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From "Musk in the car World" to "Jia Yueting in North America", Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola, fell from heaven to hell like his company's share price.

Trevor Milton, founder of US electric truck maker Nikola, has been convicted of three counts of criminal fraud, accusing him of spreading lies about the electric truck start-up for personal gain. A federal jury in Manhattan, New York, found Trevor Milton guilty of two counts of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud. The trial has been set for January 27th, 2023, which is said to be punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

According to the data, Trevor Milton was born in 1982 and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike Musk, who has a double degree in physics and economics, Trevor Milton only has a high school degree and drops out of Utah Valley University after only one semester. Trevor Milton's early entrepreneurial projects, including security system sales, used car classified advertising network, can be said to have almost no foundation in the field of new energy technology.

In 2014, with the help of new energy vehicles, the 32-year-old Trevor Milton founded Nikola, known as Tesla of the car world, because Nikola and Tesla are the name of American inventor Nikola Tesla Tesla. It is understood that the American electric car company Tesla was co-founded by Martin Eberhard and Mark Tapenning. The reason why the founder named the company "Tesla" is in memory of physicist Nikolai Tesla, and Trevor Milton named the company "Nikolai" because Tesla had already occupied a large market share in the electric vehicle market at that time. Unlike Tesla, Nikola mainly develops new energy heavy trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells and batteries.

In 2016, Nikola held a press conference to launch its first hydrogen truck product, Nikola One. Trevor Milton paints a hype about Nikola One's technology, saying the hydrogen truck takes just 15 minutes on a single charge, runs more than 1000 miles on a single charge, and has zero emissions and no pollution. In the same day's press release, Trevor Milton said that Nikola has been ahead of other automakers in technology for 10-15 years, and boasts that it has surpassed Daimler, Volvo and other mainstream truck companies within 1-2 years.

To this end, Nikola is known as the "truck version of Tesla", and with the remarks of Trevor Milton, it has attracted commercial vehicle company WABCO, hydrogen energy equipment manufacturer Nel, photovoltaic manufacturer Hanwha, and so on. These global giants not only reached strategic cooperation with Nikola, jointly carried out technology research and development, but also participated in financing.

After five years of development, an unsold Nikola has been successfully put on the market. On June 3, 2020, Nikola announced a merger with VectoIQ Acquisition Corp. Complete the merger to become the first stock of hydrogen energy heavy truck in the world. Three days after listing, Nikola's share price doubled, with a market capitalization of up to $34 billion, surpassing Ford, a century-old carmaker.

On September 8, 2020, Nikola ushered in another highlight moment when General Motors announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Nikola to obtain $2 billion of newly issued common shares of Nikola with equivalent non-cash assets. GM will own 11% of Nikola and can nominate a board member. Affected by the news, GM shares rose 7.93% on the day. Nikola shares soared 40.79%.

Only the other day, Nikola was hit on the head by the short seller. On Sept. 9, 2020, short seller Hindenburg Research released a scathing report on Nikola and its founders. The report points out that Nikola never developed hydrogen fuel technology and cashed out by forging a large number of orders. Even more bizarre, the agency pointed out that the Nikola One displayed by Nikola was not a truck because the car itself did not have power. Hindenburg said that in the official promotional video, Nikola One appears to be able to drive because it is placed on a hillside and glides down by gravity. Nikola made the car model look like it was speeding by adjusting the shooting angle and editing acceleration during the video shooting. Eventually, Nikola pleaded guilty to the charges, and founder Trevor Milton resigned on September 20, 2020.

It's hard to understand that Trevor Milton blew the company's market capitalization to $34 billion based on car models and videos alone, and tricked giants such as Bosch and General Motors into the hole. In fact, it is not only how superb the tricks of Trevor Milton are, but also the excessive touting of the new energy market.

Between 2020 and 2021, Tesla's share price rose from US $23.37 to US $414.50, an increase of 1160.09%, while the share prices of new power car companies, including Xilai, ideal and Xiaopeng, also rose sharply. In this context, global investors are trying to find the next "Tesla", not only Nikola, but also Rivian, Lordstown and many other new energy start-ups are sought after. For now, however, many new energy startups have only chicken feathers left.

As for Nikola, it miraculously built a mass-production car after the founder left. According to the latest figures, the company has begun producing and delivering electric Nikola Tre half-cards in North America, and has delivered 93 vehicles, but all of them were recalled not long ago because of parts safety problems.

The latest results show that Nikola posted a net loss of $173 million on revenue of $18.13 million in the second quarter of 2022. However, although the company's situation has improved, but revealed that PPT car behind the scenes, the company's share price is only 3.06 U. S. dollars.

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