Introducing Bad Bets Season 2: The Unraveling of Trevor Milton

Bad Bets

The Wall Street Journal

News, Business, True Crime

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2022

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bad Bets, a podcast series from The Wall Street Journal that unravels big-business dramas that have had a big impact on our world, is back for Season 2. This season, we delve into the story of Nikola founder Trevor Milton. He took his company Nikola to dizzying heights on the promise of a zero-emissions semi truck. At its peak, Nikola’s publicly traded stock was worth more than Ford—until a ragtag group of whistleblowers and short sellers revealed that Nikola and its truck wasn’t all that it seemed. This season on Bad Bets, Journal reporter Ben Foldy will tell the inside story of Trevor Milton’s rise and fall. You’ll hear exclusive interviews and recordings, and details from secret documents. And we’ll take you deep into Trevor Milton’s federal fraud trial, where he’s fighting the charges against him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Billionaire Tycoon, who promised to revolutionize the trucking industry, is being charged in
0:07.3	a ledge scheme to defraud his investors.
0:09.8	The indictment claims that Trevor Milton lied about nearly every aspect of the business.
0:14.9	The prosecutors now say those lies cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:19.2	I'm Ben Fulti, I'm a financial investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and
0:24.1	the story I'm going to tell you is one of the wildest stories I've ever encountered.
0:27.9	It's about a man who raised more than a billion dollars with a truly audacious promise.
0:32.4	Trevor Milton said that he had a semi-truck that produced zero emissions,
0:36.9	nothing but clean, pure water.
0:39.2	I can promise you that. For every doubt or out there that said that there's no way this is true.
0:43.3	Abs, how can that be possible we've done it?
0:46.2	To prove it, he showed it off at events and in video, cruising down a desert highway.
0:50.6	See the truck, know it's real, touch it, feel how sturdy it is.
0:54.0	You're going to see that this is a real truck, this is not a pusher.
0:57.2	Investors, they ate it up.
0:59.3	Thank you so much everyone, I appreciate it. Thank you.
1:02.2	At one point, the company he founded, Nikola, was valued at more than 30 billion dollars,
1:07.1	even higher than Ford. He seemed unstoppable, except...
1:12.9	He's telling everybody all these diplomats and the governors a big fat lie.
1:18.8	The person in charge of their hydrogen production turned out it was his brother who was
1:24.2	physically paving drivers in Hawaii.
1:26.8	They were sworn to secrecy to do this fake truck project.
	...

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