Nikola Corporation

According to The Times, Trump's second term has spawned an entire pardon industry with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers, and lobbyists to get to the president, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars or even a million dollars a pop.

Nikola founder Trevor Milton was sentenced to four years from defrauding investors.

He and his wife gave more than $1.8 million to Trump's re-election effort in the fall of 2024, and in March of 2025, he got a pardon.

Paul Walchak was sentenced to 18 months for pocketing millions in his employees' payroll taxes.

If you don't know, Trevor Milton is involved.

He is was with the Nikola electric car company.

They had the Badger truck and some like an electric semi thing that all went down in flames.

He got pardoned by Trump, I believe, last year.

One real example.

Hindenburg Research, a small research firm, published research in 2020 alleging fraud at the electric vehicle startup Nikola.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated, Nikola's founder was later convicted of securities fraud, and Hindenburg closed in January 2025.

Contrarian research like this helps markets find the right price, as the next lesson shows.

The lesson page has an interactive with three tabs.

According to The Times, Trump's second term has spawned an entire pardon industry with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers, and lobbyists to get to the president, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars or even a million dollars a pop.

Nikola founder Trevor Milton was sentenced to four years from defrauding investors.

He and his wife gave more than $1.8 million to Trump's re-election effort in the fall of 2024, and in March of 2025, he got a pardon.

Paul Walchak was sentenced to 18 months for pocketing millions in his employees' payroll taxes.

activity.

Research from short sellers famously exposed the fraud at Enron, WorldCom, Wirecard and the various EV manufacturers like Nikola and Lordstown.

It's important that someone is out there searching for wrongdoing and keeping companies honest.

The people who get upset about short sellers like to say that they can put good companies out of business, but if a company is in good financial health, with cash in the bank and steady cash flows, and the allegations are false, the company can't really be shut down.

the hard way, A, with chargers on our property and with Volvo Vs, we went through multiple battery swaps with those vehicles as we kept seeing failures and realized pretty quickly that the range was not enough for what we needed in Southern California.

And so then we took a big leap into the Nikola hydrogen fuel cell truck, right? And we all know how that ended up.

They're still on the road, right? We've got one parked out here, and I kind of view that as our classic.

Still a big believer in hydrogen, but I think what's happened is Tesla has, they've disrupted the market, right? They brought a truck to market.

And then I kept like buying that stock and trading that stock in and out because I had some conviction in it.

But my nightmare story was I got long Nikola and I bought it when it was $30 a share.

And then it went up to 60.

I'm like, okay, I'm going to add on.

And I'm like, well...

I just lost all that money.

But fortunately I was hedged and I had other things I'm performing, but I'll never get the money back from Nikola.

But I bought into the story and a lot of it's narrative and optics, right? It's psychology.

Rivian, although it ended up coming back, but lucid.

Nikola, Canoo, the Lion Electric, Lightning Motors, Lordstown Motors, Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, all saw their stocks punch more than 90% from peak to 12.

Many, like Nikola, turned out to be, well, had some fraudulence.

Their founder and CEO was even sentenced to prison.

Again, though, we had roughly 600 companies come public just in 2021.