Nikola

On the evening of December 1, 2016, Trevor Milton unveiled the Nikola One, a hydrogen-electric semi-truck, to an invited audience at his company's Salt Lake City headquarters. There would be a chain on the seats, he said; he didn't want anyone driving the truck off the stage, according to an excerpt of the event video published by the short seller Hindenburg Research.

The truck "fully functions and works which is really incredible," Milton told the audience.

It could not run under its own power that night "or at any time thereafter," according to a Securities and Exchange Commission order against the company. Nikola agreed in December 2021 to pay a $125 million penalty, without admitting or denying the findings. In January 2018 the company had posted a video captioned "Behold, the Nikola One in motion." The truck was rolling down an incline, the order says.

Nikola went public in June 2020 through a merger announced in March at an enterprise value of about $3.3 billion. Within a week its market value passed Ford's. It had not yet sold a vehicle.

That September, General Motors agreed to take an 11% stake, $2 billion of new Nikola stock, in exchange for engineering and building its pickup. Two days later Hindenburg published its report. The company replied on September 14 that it "never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video, although the truck was designed to do just that". Milton resigned on September 20. GM passed on the stake in November.

A federal jury convicted Milton in October 2022 of one count of securities fraud and two of wire fraud, and acquitted him of a second securities-fraud count. "I believe the jury got it right," Judge Edgardo Ramos said in December 2023, sentencing him to four years. Milton stayed free pending appeal.

Nikola filed for Chapter 11 on February 19, 2025, with about $47 million in cash. On March 27 Milton announced that President Trump had pardoned him, and the White House confirmed it. The president "signed my full and unconditional pardon of innocence," Milton said on Instagram. A pardon "does not signify innocence," according to the Justice Department's pardon office. By December 2025 Nikola's only employee was the liquidating trustee.

Since October 2025 Milton has been chief executive of SyberJet Aircraft, which is developing a light jet. Planes, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2026, will be "10 times harder than Nikola ever was," TechCrunch reported.

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