Where to start? As you all know, I alleged that the Nikola One was not functional. I will have more details about that later today. But just to give you an idea of the lengths Nikola went to lie, let me tell you the story about when they rolled it down a hill. #Trevorgate
Some of you may remember this video. It was the first time a Nikola Truck was seen moving. But the truck was not functional. I found out that the truck was rolled down a steep hill, so I set out to find out where it happened.
Lined up the mountains and salt flats and found the spot. The lengths they went to scout this place is incredible. Very remote, little traffic, but has a 2 mile 3 percent grade, but no features to betray the grade so they could tilt the camera, so they could make it look level.
There is a reservoir on the other side of the road that reveals the slope, needless to say they kept that out of the frame. But it's a huge hill. We went out there and put our car in neutral and got up to over 55 mph.
You can check it out. It's on the Mormon Trail a couple miles south of Grantsville, Utah. They hit this thing hard on social media. Until this year it was the highest viewed video on their Facebook channel (230k views). They put it in their promotional video to silence skeptics.
Complete fraud. But that's what Trevor's superpower is. He is not afraid to lie to anyone. Investors, top CEOs, military visitors, governors and politicians. His lies are so brazen that people assume they must be true. He's leveraged nothing to a 20 bln empire on this skill.
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Here is the story of the biggest allegation against Nikola that did NOT make it into the Hindenberg Report--and why it was left off.
Please read this whole thread. It is an important story, and delves into some of the unexpected issues that can face whistleblowers. 1/x
As I researched Nikola in August 2020, one of my biggest questions was: "What are they doing for batteries?" I had already discovered that Trevor was falsely stating that off the shelf inverters were made by Nikola, & I suspected something similar was happening w/ batteries. 2/x
The inverter lie was a big deal but batteries would be even bigger as that's the most important part of an EV, something where a company can build significant value if they have some clever IP. I knew enough about Nikola to know that they couldn't be making batteries in house 3/x
I read Trevor's June 2020 interview with Bloomberg this morning. Unsurprisingly, it was full of lies. That's what liars do--they lie. And when they get caught in a lie, they tell different lies. This is a skill that Trevor has, and he uses it here fluently.
Trevor's answer to Bloomberg's allegations that the Nikola One prototype was not functional was to say that it was made nonfunctional for safety reasons. This is a lie. It was not functional because Trevor ran out of time, expertise and (probably) money to make it functional.
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Trevor says that the motors and gear boxes were removed for safety reasons. Lie. They were not removed because they were never installed. Empty shells were lowered into the truck. How do I know? Reader, I was there.
So, let's talk about the Nikola Two. For those who don't know, that's the two trucks that they had Bosch design and build for them a couple of years ago. It's their ace in the hole--a truck that runs! We've all seen videos of it limping around the parking lot.
Please read on...
So, the Nikola Two does run. But does it run well? No. In one of Trevor's most brazen and bizarre lies, he claimed that it could do 0-60 in under five seconds, when anyone could see it took at least 10 seconds. Trevor deleted the video, but here it is:
When people called him out his responses were bizarre. He claimed that the ten seconds was from 0 to 60 then back to 0 even though the video plainly contradicts this. He promised that an edited video would somehow clarify what everyone could see themselves (that video never came)
It wasn't the biggest news to drop this weekend, but the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal both confirmed the rumor that Nikola signed a contract with Romeo Power to use their batteries in the Tre. Here is a (long) thread explaining why this is so important.
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Not only does this represent yet another lie from Nikola (Trevor stated on several occasions that the Tre would be using Nikola batteries) but it also has forced them to make a grave design error. This thread will be a little technical, but I'll try to explain this crucial error.
So, a little background on battery design. When you are designing a battery you have two separate things that you have to account for: capacity, which gives you range, and voltage, which allows you to provide necessary power. You get both of these by connecting together cells.
When Trevor switched from CNG to H2, he didn’t want the range to decrease so he arbitrarily kept it at 1200 miles. At the show, he defended the range with numbers “based on our testing”. They weren’t—the truck wasn’t done. And they ended up being off by more than a 2x factor.
All this time he was taking preorders with deposits—for an order value book of billions of dollars if you believe his numbers. And then he used that to raise huge investment. THAT is why this is such a huge scandal. The lie about the functional truck mattered.
Mark Russell has tried to defend this scandal by saying that the truck was designed to be functional. But if they had actually finished the truck and done the testing they claimed, they would have found the specs they were promising were massively off, both range and mileage.
Who is the CIO of Nikola? Well, according to LinkedIn, there are two people: Morgan Mackelprang since 2015 and Isaac Sloan since 2019. Obviously they don't have two CIOs, and since Isaac is more recent and listed on the website, he is the real one. Read on...
So apparently Morgan never updated his LinkedIn to reflect that he is not their CIO. But who is Morgan Mackelprang? In short, he is one of Trevor Milton's closest deputies. They go way back.
A decade ago, Trevor and Morgan were entering contests together for Doritos commercials. But they have been together for much longer, being long time friends.