US President Donald Trump has pardoned Trevor Milton, the founder of the bankrupt electric and hydrogen truck manufacturer Nikola, who was convicted of fraud.
In 2023, Milton was found guilty of lying to investors about Nikola’s technology and sentenced to four years in prison.
“Today I was issued a full and unconditional pardon by Donald Trump himself,” Milton said in an Instagram post. “He called me personally to tell me.”
Speaking to reporters, Trump confirmed the pardon, saying it was recommended by “many people.”
Milton’s conviction followed a damning Hindenburg Research report questioning his past business dealings and the technology behind Nikola’s hydrogen trucks.
A key accusation was that a promotional video released in 2018 for the hydrogen-powered Nikola One concept truck, which showed the semi-truck cruising along a road at high speed, was an elaborate ruse.
Hindenburg claimed that Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill. Nikola was forced to admit the truck was indeed ‘in motion’ through such means while countering that it never directly said the truck was using its own powertrain.
Milton consistently denied the allegations.
In an Instagram video, Milton declared he was “free.”
Last month, Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after funding efforts failed.
When darkness descended: Three weeks that rocked Nikola Corporation
It is easy to fall from grace, especially in the public eye. The hard part is to earn respect and keep it. That’s the challenge facing Nikola Corporation, particularly since the departure of its founder and former Chairman Trevor Milton.
The Arizona-based company has famously enjoyed a somewhat meteoric rise to the forefront of the heavy-duty trucking sector and more importantly, the clean-fuelled heavy-duty trucking movement. From a basement-based start-up it has emerged into one of the most talked about vehicle manufacturers of the moment, with a clear objective to remove the commercial truck from the carbon equation.
But it endured a tumultuous three weeks since a high-profile ‘research report’ made a series of extensive allegations against it in a savage attack on 10th September (2020), many of which claimed that it has no working prototypes…
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