People are living longer, so the career you expected to cap off at 40 years could last 60.

There are very few people who can work 40 years and save enough money to not work for another 30.

Get ready for a 60-year career with a special series on your money briefing from the Wall Street Journal, Wednesdays in September.

From the Wall Street Journal, this is Bad Bats. I'm Ben Foldey.

In our first episode, the brand new company Trevor Milton started, Dehybrid, and passed its first big test.

The company had impressed executives at Swift Transportation, one of the biggest trucking companies in America.

We'll come back to that. But spoiler alert, Dehybrid would ultimately fail.

There's a reason you've heard of Nikola and not Dehybrid.

Years later, when Nikola went public and Trevor Milton was being hailed as a visionary founder,

he talked about his past failures and what he learned from them.

He raised on a podcast called The Truck Show.

Saying that Nikola investors were treating it as a company worth billions of dollars, in part because of those failures.

They want to know that you've failed. They want to know that you've been destroyed and gotten back up.

And because when times get tough, they want to know you're the right leader.

So all those guys out there listening right now, like, if you failed, all that means is that you're going to be a better leader in the future.

You're going to have more compassion, you're going to understand more, and you're never going to give up.

And people will invest in you because of your failures.

That's how Trevor saw it. But what's interesting to me, having reported this, is how Trevor pitched and managed the companies that ultimately failed.

And what happened to some of their investors? Because as I dug deeper into Trevor's past, I found patterns that repeated themselves.

Trevor, a natural salesman, would build up his businesses using charm and a big vision.

He had a real knack for raising money, often making big promises to investors.

And later, just like they would at Nikola, some investors in those businesses would be left with big life-changing losses, as Trevor rolled on.

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