Founder convicted 2022 · pardoned 2025
Nikola
An electric and hydrogen truck company whose founder was convicted of misleading investors about the company's progress — and who was subsequently pardoned.
What happened
Nikola went public via a special purpose acquisition company and reached a very large market capitalisation on the strength of claims about its hydrogen and electric truck technology.
In October 2022 the founder, Trevor Milton, was convicted of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud relating to claims he had made to investors about the company's progress. In December 2023 he was sentenced to four years in prison.
In March 2025 he was pardoned by President Trump. Reporting at the time noted that Milton and his wife had together made contributions to the president's re-election effort totalling more than $1.8m the previous October.
Nikola itself did not survive. The company filed for bankruptcy protection, and the entry is included here because the investor-facing lesson — about claims made regarding a physical product's state of completion — is independent of the legal aftermath.
Visible at the time
What an investor could have seen
These are things that were observable before the collapse, not hindsight dressed as foresight. Some failures genuinely could not be seen coming; where that is the case, this section says so rather than inventing a warning.
- Demonstrations of a physical product where the conditions of the demonstration were not disclosed.
- A gap between what engineers would say about the state of the technology and what investors were told.
- A public-market listing route that involved lighter forward-looking disclosure standards than a conventional IPO.
- Claims about production timelines that had already slipped repeatedly.
For your own diligence
What to do differently
- For a physical product, ask what stage it is genuinely at — laboratory, prototype, pilot unit at a customer site, or manufactured product — and ask under what conditions any demonstration was performed. The gaps between those stages are where hardware companies fail.
- Talk to the engineers, not only the founders. In deep tech and hardware the distance between what the technical team will confirm and what the pitch asserts is the single most informative measurement available.
- Treat a listing route with lighter disclosure requirements as a reason to do more of your own work, not less.
- And note the general point: legal outcomes move. A conviction is not the end of a story, which is why this site records the date any legal status was accurate to.
Checked, not remembered
Sources
Legal outcomes on these pages move — convictions are appealed, sentences reduced, pardons and commutations granted. Every status here is stated with the date it was accurate to, and every figure is traceable to the reporting linked below.
Nikola: common questions
Does the pardon mean the conviction was wrong?
What is the diligence lesson for hardware companies?
Keep reading