The Unraveling of Trevor Milton, Ep 3: “Paul Echo Mango”

Bad Bets

The Wall Street Journal

News, Business, True Crime

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A jury has convicted Nikola founder Trevor Milton in his federal fraud trial. To better understand what led up to this moment, we hear from some of the engineers Nikola hired to help make Trevor’s idea of a zero-emissions semi truck a reality. In this episode, they tell us how Trevor’s statements about the Nikola One increasingly outpaced what they had actually managed to build. Ben Foldy is the host of this season of Bad Bets. Bad Bets is a production of The Wall Street Journal. This season is produced with Jigsaw Productions, in collaboration with Story Force Entertainment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	caution. The ultimate spicy meatball from Domino's is hot. Just not stupid hot. It won't earn you
0:05.4	mythical status or get you a nickname like Mad Dog or Dragon's Breath. It's hot. Good hot.
0:10.8	The kind of hot that boosts taste nothing else. The ultimate spicy meatball with Siracha
0:15.2	Drizzle from Domino's, it will get you fired up. Subject to availability.
0:23.2	From the Wall Street Journal, this is Bad Betts. I'm Ben Foldey. We open this series
0:28.6	talking about Trevor Milton's federal fraud trial. That trial has now reached a verdict.
0:33.7	Trevor Milton was found guilty of making false and misleading statements regarding
0:39.0	Nicolas Business. His sentencing is scheduled for January. Milton now facing a sentence of more
0:44.2	than 20 years in prison. I was in the courtroom when the verdict was read. Trevor seemed shocked
0:50.4	and stayed with his family for a long time after the jury filed out. Outside the court house,
0:55.7	he told reporters, quote, I did nothing wrong, end quote. He and his lawyers have pledged to keep
1:00.5	fighting. In a statement, Nicolas said the company was pleased to close this chapter and focus on
1:05.9	executing its business strategy. We'll get back to the trial in a later episode. But this episode
1:14.7	is all about how Trevor got here. It's about everything that had to change in the world to put
1:19.6	him in a position to both raise so much money and eventually getting so much trouble for how he raised
1:23.9	it. A lot of things had to happen. One of the first factors started shifting in 2011, far
1:30.4	away from Utah. President Obama in the State of the Union speech that year made clean energy
1:36.4	a national priority. We're issuing a challenge. We're telling America's scientists and engineers that
1:42.6	if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields and focus on the hardest problems in clean
1:48.4	energy, we'll fund the Apollo projects of our time. He said it would be like this generation's
1:53.9	moonshot and zero emission vehicles powered by batteries and hydrogen would be a big part of it.
1:59.2	With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels and become
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