Trevor Milton and Nikola after the fraud conviction

Trevor Milton became one of the signature figures of the SPAC-era boom and bust. The original scandal centered on claims that Nikola had overstated what its electric and hydrogen truck technology could actually do. In October 2022, Milton was convicted on fraud counts. In December 2023, he was sentenced to four years in prison. That might sound like a clean ending, but it was not. In 2024, a judge also ordered Milton to pay Nikola $168 million in an arbitration-related dispute. Then, in February 2025, Nikola itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, making the broader collapse of the company impossible to separate from the founder's misconduct. In March 2025, Reuters reported that Milton had received a full pardon from Trump. Later that year, the SEC moved to dismiss its civil case against him. This is exactly the kind of story where the public remembers the flashy allegations and maybe the conviction, but not the strange later turn in which the company failed, the founder was pardoned, and the civil-regulatory track largely fell away.