Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon | Hacker News Reader

Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon

eletric-vehicles.com

327 pointsxnx236 comments

Lest we forget:

"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."

https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-... - April 24, 2019

Wow, this is like an instant cure for imposter syndrome. I might hang this on my wall.

That can't be real - wow. They were the company that rolled the vehicle downhill to make it look like progress right?

By order of Trump, that never happened.[1][2] Financial claims against Milton are now void.

The Führer is never wrong.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardons-nikola-trevor-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1395001/dl

The founders argued over the presidential pardon having to much power, and decided that congress's impeachment power would prevent abuse.

Hah! Guess they didn't see these voting patterns coming! They gave you “A republic, if you can keep it.” - I will admit, you gave it a pretty good run.

voting patterns? The founders didn't want most people to vote.

Then they must have seen it even less.

Incorrect. Why do you think they held that view in the first place? Ironic you can't seem to grasp the meaning of the quote you so smugly parroted.

> Financial claims against Milton are now void.

Presidential pardons do not limit or prevent private civil lawsuits.

But pressuring the SEC to drop the civil claims does!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/sec-trump-cle...

If you get scammed by a box on wheels being rolled down the road or someone repeatedly saying HTML5 then...you had it coming and it is probably best that someone else uses your money.

Also, CEOs of public companies lie persistently, huge lies that directly cause people to lose money. Nothing happens because that is the part of the game: they lie, you try to work out if other people will believe it for long enough. For startups, because there is no existing revenue, the lies are criminal. There is no distinction in reality.

> If you get scammed by a box on wheels being rolled down the road or someone repeatedly saying HTML5 then...you had it coming and it is probably best that someone else uses your money.

I'd prefer to not give liars and cheats even more money so that they can improve their grifting - this is not behaviour that benefits society at all.

yeah https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...

Check his Instagram! He's portraying himself as a saint, a massive victim, and vowing to sue everyone else, from Nikola for defrauding him :-)

Someone should be selling motivational posters with these kind of funny quotes from our dear "tech leaders". There should be a gallery of funny quotes to choose from so I can put them on my wall and feel better about myself.

Same!! I'd definitely consider buying some for myself, and perhaps also as gag-gifts for other tech friends lol. I happen to have access to amazon merch from forever ago, which doesn't have posters, but does allow throw pillows.... I might spend the weekend playing with one lol

lol Here's the throw pillow: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FRZPJDZ4

Wow. Quotes like these really illustrate to me that I may have some massive blind spots and lack a lot of skills that help make people lots of money. This fellow is worth $3 billion and just spouts gibberish.

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks. I have a pack of a few friends who have been doing this for years. I think most of their ideas are pretty awful, but who knows, maybe one day they'll be right?

Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.

Wait, are you saying my jeans with reinforced kevlar crotches won't take off!? Blasphemy; I'll never give up on Crotchstrong.

> I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks.

Also remember survivorship bias: lots of folks with "initiative and [high?] risk tolerance" fail, but you may not hear about them.

Obligatory:

* https://xkcd.com/1827/

I don't think most fail is the right word. Because for instance appealing to my personal anecdote of my friend pack of serial entrepreneurs, they're mostly making beer money from their projects.

If you clocked the hours they spent and compared it to a decent consulting fee then yeah - they're losing lots of money. But in reality they're doing that stuff during the time that most of us are shit posting, browsing the web, playing games, and so on. And so if you compare it to that, they're making a hefty chunk of change with the upside that they do have a chance, whatever it may be, of something really sticking and that being their to the Moon project. And you know, even just getting to the atmosphere is enough for a life changing result.

Or getting back to the Y Combinator thing. It costs $0 to apply, and the worst that happens is that they say no. All it takes is giving up a bit of time off our shitposting time. But that's somehow not an offer many of us are willing to accept, which is really pretty weird if you think about it!

This is correct. HN is full of people making mid 6 figures that can't seem to get over the idea that people making 7 figures or more are doing it unfairly just because those people aren't scaled up versions of themselves. You don't have to be smarter than a good engineer to be a good founder or CEO because it's fundamentally a different skill set and risk tolerance. They latch onto single cases of fraud and generalize it to all rich people because it is convenient. Of course theft and fraud occurs at all levels on the org chart, but it doesn't make the news when some IC steals a couple hundred K from his company.

There are plenty of fair points many would find uncomfortable trying to accept from above, particularly around how much risk is sensible to take and deal with. Hell, even knowing and believing people tend to undervalue risk... I still don't think I take enough risk myself.

At the same time, I think going from mid-6 to 7 figure income is a lot less controversial than 10 figure net worth. It's still unlikely to be related to whether someone is a scaled up version of another, but at what point you consider the reasons for earning that much "fair" tend to go a lot deeper than plain fraud.

The people who succeed the most with fraud are those who tell lies that people want to believe. A LOT of people wanted to believe that there could be a second electric car company and that they could get rich off it. That is why the fraud worked so well.

AI is the same. I am pretty sure at any company you have executives saying things about AI that not only aren't true, they can never be true. However, this is the story that people are willing to believe.

Also, just generally, the question is wrong. Perpetrating a massive fraud is very time-consuming and, ultimately, requires a level of self-deception that most people don't have the energy for. Milton, SBF, etc. did the things they did because they wanted to believe they were someone other than who they were. There is nothing wrong with knowing who you are and just being that person. To say this another way, Milton was clearly unwell, he is now unwell with more money than can be actually used, being unwell is not an example for anyone particularly when you trade it for something with extremely limited marginal value.

> The people who succeed the most with fraud are those who tell lies that people want to believe.

Jason Zweig:

    There are three ways to make a living:
        1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
        2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
        3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

* https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/

A difference in skill level is not a difference in morality. Nobody is out there only scamming people out of thousands because they have a moral objection to taking millions.

It also goes hand in hand with people undervaluing the act of taking on risk in the first place. Hence overbeaten cliches like "insurance is a scam"/"stock market is just gambling" etc.

(Don't get me wrong there are systemic issues with both of the examples above, but the point is fundamentally there's value in understanding and taking on risks that others might be less willing to take)

Usually rich parents.

That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.

It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.

> It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM

And it's not shocking that someone from Utah starts an MLM. MLM and other scams seem to be the main industry in Utah.

Along with soda shops and cookie companies.

A non-snarky comment is in my experience the LDS church puts a great deal of emphasis on entrepreneurship, wealth, and "excellence in all things" that leads some to do great things and others to shamelessly steal and cheat.

Fraud is an essential subcomponent of entrepreneurship. You cannot have one without the other. If I am trying to get you to invest in something, you have to swap cash today for a vague promise about the future.

This does not make it less wrong but fraud is essential.

Your definition of fraud is nonsense.

> wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain

There is no reason entrepreneurship has to involve deception.

Beats the hell out of the "everybody successful got there by luck and/or being a bad person" attitude around here, that's for damn sure.

Poetry. The ability to be awed by the wonders all around him, and to transmit that awe to others. A true communion with the fantastical.

I think this is perhaps one factor that feeds into the "reality distortion field" I have seen around particular leaders. You don't feel like they're trying to goad you into seeing it their way, you just sort of naturally start to believe in their project (their? is our project, comrade!).

Charisma (or Riz, now, I guess) is just a naturally in-built trait in some segment of the population. We evolved to be collective and cooperative by following leaders. We have never had a meritocratic or scientific system for choosing who to follow.

I do agree with your conclusion, but I'd add that charisma is also very much learned, like a lot of other traits. Lots of trials at seeing what people respond to and honing in on what works, weeding out what doesn't and if you're in the serial entrepreneur/cult leader business: an ever evolving language of sophistry that keeps up with the baseline level of critical thought, but also weeds out actual skeptics quickly because you don't want them around your followers.

I think it's important to point out that even extremely intelligent and talented individuals can lack critical scepticism when deciding to follow a leader or stay with a particular project. I've seen so much human energy and engineering talent go into a business that everyone should have known, didn't have organization, strategy, or actual leadership to build real product and be a viable business.

I agree very much!

A lot of smart people get woo-ed by bad pitches or wrapped up in cults too. It's all about how the message is coded for the target audience. An astute MLM seller uses very different language to sell to a small farmer vs a young silicon valley graduate[1]. There's also the aspect of how vulnerable the audience is at that point in their lives, cults are especially good (bad?) at finding people in tumultuous periods in their lives, looking for any sort of hope and/or support system to pull them through it. Then the cult provides the community and short-term structure they crave at the time, to their long-term detriment.

Personally, how relatively smart and even generally skeptical people fall for cults and conspiracy theories is one of the most fascinating sociological phenomena out there.

[1] leaning somewhat on general stereotypes for the sake of argument, not insinuating all these people are the same, or implying anything about the relative intelligence of a farmer vs a silicon valley graduate.

This is not even a joke.

Maybe what you have that Milton lacks is integrity.

Nearly all people value good articulation over intelligence. This is why people who interview well get jobs over people who do good work. It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't. And why Trevor Milton can bilk investors of claims about HTML5 supercomputers while nerds get brushed off talking about tensor-chip accelerated attention models.

The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.

> It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't.

I'm going to have to disagree. There are many things that make the two Steves different. Woz was just never interested in the same things Jobs was. Woz wanted to make cool shit. Jobs wanted to have his products rule the world.

Woz did make billions though

He didn't. First, he gave away a good chunk to early employees who didn't have stock when the IPO happened. Then, he liquidated his Apple in the mid-1980s.

He certainly could have made billions if he had been greedy (not given any away) and lazy (just lived off the dividends and never sold) and never done another thing in his life - more billions than Bezos.

> What skills does he have that I completely lack?

As George Carlin would say, it's a big club, and you ain't in it.

> What skills does he have that I completely lack?

1. The ability to lie shamelessly.

2. Charisma.

3. Confidence.

The last two (or all three, really) can be combined into ‘salesmanship’, more or less.

IMO it all combines into confidence. Which you can't project so to say if you can not make yourself believe in your own lies for a moment, and charisma is just another name for confidence. Or hutzpah for that matter.

Key point is to not let yourself forget what is that you're doing: manipulating people. Or in other words, don't forget that there is such thing as reality. Many fell into this one trap.

I want to add from my own experience, he doesn't have to be accountable for anything. This post supports it.

Conviction is a good combination of the last two. Or to cover it all

Shameless Conviction.

>What skills does he have that I completely lack?

You'd be amazed how "successful" one can be if willing to lie, cheat and/or steal.

He doesn't have a conscience.

You have ethics and the ability to feel shame.

It's not skills that got him ahead. It's the connections to the "right" people that can be benefit him the most.

Google "dark triad".

> What skills does he have that I completely lack?

It does not take any special skills to do this. All it takes is having no integrity.

It's not a lack of integrity. Such people actually believe their own bs. They are functional schizophrenics.

> What skills does he have that I completely lack?

The ability to tell tall tales that are completely disconnected from reality. And be able to do so with utter confidence.

Did you just describe LLMs?

LLM is just a statistical model representing the average human writing shit on the internet, so same same?

Either corruption was always happening maximally, and we've finally begun to notice , or corruption has reached a new maximum.

Either way, it's maximum corruption.

And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.

I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.

We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.

We are much closer to zero corruption than maximum corruption. How many times have you bribed a public official in your life? In many places it is considered a routine part of navigating bureaucracy.

And if you think decentralization brings fairness I suggest you visit some of the more decentralized parts of the world. Decentralization can solve some problems, but that's not one of them.

Is your tongue smooth?

need to get me one of these HTML 5 supercomputers

Sales

https://xkcd.com/1827/

Ah, thanks, I thought it was a series of tubes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

That’s so wrong that even the opposite of it is wrong.

And it receives data from a set of tubes which some experts call "internet"

This sounds a lot like Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens. You can just hear the frustrated aide trying to explain a concept to him in the simplest possible terms and then he totally mangles it.

vue, it's vue.

The most important thing to note is that Trevor Milton, who plainly defrauded investors (rolling a model truck down an incline and calling it self powered), hired Bradley Bondi as his attorney.

Bradley Bondi is Pam Bondi's (yes the attorney general) brother.

Pam Bondi also famously took a bribe to allow trump off the hook before his 2016 run. Everything around trump is insanely corrupted by him. She was of course "cleared" of any wrongdoing in the situation, but it was extremely transparent: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-ag-pam-bondi-is-cleared...

How to know all you need to know about the level of corruption the US is suffering: compare the dearth of news articles regarding the president's net worth increase of $3 billion dollars since taking office with the plethora of news articles covering his wife's wardrobe choices.

> compare the dearth of news articles regarding the president's net worth increase of $3 billion dollars since taking office

Outrage fatigue. The actions are so constant and outrageous that it's hard to keep up. There's an item every single week that would've gotten a president impeached 20 years ago.

Never before has any administration made me feel like I need to create a goddamn mind-map or wiki just to document the hundreds of crimes and scandals with unique primary keys.

Even when you drop the detail level down to exclude individual names it's just too damn much.

I wonder if there's some prior-art in The investigative journalism field which could be relevant...

McSweeneys published an exhaustive list before the 2020 election[1].

[1] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atr...

I began keeping my own little list of things after the inauguration. It's very incomplete. I would love to see a broader effort toward a more complete list. I'd also like it to be limited to extremely serious and verified, indisputable information. There's enough cruelty and corruption that we don't need to count things that might be taken out of context or easy to dismiss.

Setting up this wiki to collect and organize the massive amounts of information seems like an excellent idea.

A Trumpedia documenting the extent of the case, with cross-links and what not, could be one of the game-changing educational tools of the century.

If you figure out write rights and moderation.

It's an exercise in futility - it does not and will not ever matter

I’ve fantasized that an ideal version could help equip me with ample evidence when debunking propaganda during in-person conversations with the only partially-indoctrinated. Is it too optimistic to hope that the network effects of a very popular resource with exceptional UX could, at the very least, nudge a needle somewhere out there?

> Outrage fatigue. The actions are so constant and outrageous that it's hard to keep up.

That is exactly the idea... By dumping non-stop the most nonsense things into the news cycle, the actual interesting events gets overshadowed.

Oooo, oooo, Trump said X ... lets all focus on X, ignoring corruption or people's rights slowly being dismantled... This was literally in that 2025 Plan.

And the issue is that people actually seem to have more and more comprehension issues.

A while ago i made a post regarding a specific hosting provider not releasing any new products in 2025, clearly talking and listing hardware releases from the previous years.

The first two comments pointed out that a interface change was a new product (its not) and a product launch from end 2024 (2024 != 2025). Point out that those comments are wrong. downvoted, ... again, and again.

Its like people seem to lose the ability to read, or critically think about what is written. Its one of the main reasons i do not like to post on most social media platforms anymore. Its like people want to argue, need to oppose what is written, be outraged by what they see. Like we all gotten dumber or maybe social media / forums etc only showed how we really are.

And all that news feeds into this. The people behind Trump understand that people have this lacking ability, and know that if they flood the news with nonsense, actual journalism simply dies. It also does not help that most news is owned by big corporations, with often dubious links, and the main motivation being profit!

It's a difficult information landscape. Our brains are developed for foraging berries and maintaining a social network of maybe a few dozen individuals.

How to know all you need to know about the level of corruption the US is suffering: The majority of voters voted for a traitor that supported overturning an election, and campaigned on pardoning traitors.

The number of articles about a measly $3B is far down the list (which is impossible to verify anyway).

Depends on your sources I guess. I have seen many articles about Trump's corruption and basically zero about Melania's fashion.

Also used to do work for Qatar, hence why it's not corrupt at all for Trump to accept a plane from Qatar.

So how to get these people punished? How do you punish people who are completely and utterly above the law?

lol you don't - we are beyond rule of law in America

> we are beyond rule of law in America

Yes. I wish more people had the balls to say it...

I was about to ask just how evil he has to be to go out of his way to pardon this guy, but then here we are, realizing just how evil and corrupt he really is.

Beautiful pay to play at work here. The tech leaders saw this way ahead of time and so aligned themselves with the administration and kissed the ring. They can get away with anything they want. At the very least, they know they will be able to get all regulations off their backs and get favorable regulations as well if they pay their way through.

Is it legal to teach these kinds (in my personal opinion) of skills in Business School: either extortion (administration threatens / complains, companies pay, administration stops complaining), or the seeming corruption illustrated (again IMO) here?

- Extortion example: Trump in a White House Lawn gaggle interview this week complained at / threatened Australia's ABC reporter and then Australia itself with additional tarriffs, after the reporter asked about loss of freedom of speech relating to FCC complaining & threatening "big stick or little stick, you decide" to ABC/Disney who needed FCC's near-future approval for a pending business-merger, which ABC/Disney then terminated a thorn in the side of the President .. comedian Jimmy Kimmel. It's pretty clear, in my personal opinion, that this was extortion

Again, these are my personal opinions.

> Is it legal to teach [corruption]

Essentially what corporate law is all about. Huge drain on innovation and an accelerant for corruption. We’ve grown so used to it now that we don’t even see it. Agree to terms, move on. Hear about some class-action lawsuit relevant to you, but never get anything from it. Nowadays we don’t even have a right to class-action in most agreements we sign with corporations. The same vultures in corporate law are making their way into public law. It’s like mixing bleach and ammonia.

Fascinating - thank you also for the helpful (to me) analogy.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321

It's the party of rules for thee, not for me.

It turns out all of the "institutions", customs and traditions, not technically enforced by law, had an important effect on restraining corruption. Turns out they were only really enforced by the public, but with the general (intentional, IMO) erosion in faith in the government and institutions, the public no longer cares.

Well, many of these actions are illegal. But law is not self-enforcing. If POTUS is the origin of the corruption and his party in Congress doesn't impeach or otherwise constrain, then he's allowed to do whatever he wants.

> Well, many of these actions are illegal.

SCOTUS ruled that official actions of POTUS can't be illegal, and can't even be investigated.

You better believe that if a Democrat were in the White House doing similar things, the conservative wing of SCOTUS would have voted the other way.

I no longer consider SCOTUS rulings as good measures of what the law actually is. Instead I look to the lower court decisions that brought us there. If they agree with SCOTUS, or there's no consensus, then sure, ok. But if the lower court rulings are largely the opposite of the final SCOTUS rulings -- especially if the lower court judges include folks appointed by Trump or another conservative president -- I think it's fair to assume that SCOTUS's decision is partisan, ideological bullshit that bears little resemblance to actual law in the US.

It pains me to say or even think this, because in the past I've had a lot of respect for our Supreme Court, but that respect is completely gone at this point.

+1 and IMO this is substantiated even if you ignore actual policy/political differences.

This SCOTUS has used the shadow docket to overturn (without actually ruling on) lower court decisions extremely frequently. These “decisions” (really delays in the administration’s favor) are increasingly offered without rationale and even without the majority Justices signing their names to the order.

IMO they know the administration is way afoul of the law (which is why so many lower courts are finding such in 50-150 page considerations) but they don’t want to have to decide on that. So instead they’re relying on the shadow docket and not providing any rationale or signatures to try to escape the shame they know history will bring upon them.

This "rounds to true" at the middle school level, but isn't actually true at all at the level of a civically-minded adult.

Downvoting because I don't think it meets the bar at HN.

It seems like there are a lot of things that are either illegal, or somehow forbidden, where the only enforcement allowed is impeachment and removal. Given how partisanship has turned out in the US, this is a major flaw in the constitution IMO (along with it being to hard to amend).

> It's the party of rules for thee, not for me.

Hypocrisy is a virtue:

> It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.

> It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.

> It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.

> It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.

> For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.

* https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267

* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to whit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

I'm always annoyed by that saying. It's basically an indictment of government power (and power in general), not just "conservatism." It could apply as well to Stalin and Mao as to Trump and the Bushes.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because this is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because this is according to my principles. - Frank Herbert

How can equality in the eyes of the law be an indictment of government power? That’s a demented thing to say.

The core "leftist" agenda is equality. If we're all equal, there's no in-group.

The thing is, we're not all equal, and no amount of wishful thinking is ever going to change that. There will always be favored in-groups and disfavored out-groups.

It's the goal and pretending it cannot even be approximated is very American of you. Arguing it's impossible actually sounds bigoted. What exactly do you think makes some people inferior in your eyes?

What'll really mess with your right wing sensibilities is that equality, happiness and ranking high on various democracy indexes all correlate. Arguing against happiness sounds just weird.

It's the goal and pretending it cannot even be approximated is very American of you

It's your goal. Speak for yourself, please. You seem to be quite good at that.

Ah ok, so your goal is literally to have second-class humans. Or do you even consider them human? Okay. I wasn't expect such an outright admission. Wow.

We may not be created equal, but we can still treat another as we’d treat ourselves.

Do you believe that people who quote this believe the Democrats are perfect and beyond any criticism?

Just take it for what it is as a commentary on US politics instead of trying to expand it beyond it's intended reach.

What we're learning these days is that there is nothing special or interesting about US politics. We're all Turks now, having freely elected our Erdogan.

The trouble with politics now is that it has become a religion. You can't elect boring people anymore, because doing so would remove the ability for adherents to engage in religious fervor.

Before politics can be boring and fair, adherence to actual religion must be rebuilt to satisfy the people's need for religion, so that politics doesn't have to.

Interesting perspective, hadn't heard it phrased like that before. An aversion to 'boring' candidates, I can believe... but religion as the remedy? What will that religion look like, if not another Trump-like personality cult?

Mainstream Christianity gave us Trump, so it's not exactly the moral foundation it claimed to be. There are plenty of cults and factions that could potentially salvage it, but how will any of them get traction? Or are you thinking of something even further afield than that?

I question "mainstream". I would say it's a peculiarly American blend of prosperity gospel and pick-and-choose.

America didn't invent those tenors of self-serving cant, but it is the exemplar today

This supposed Christianity was one of the bigger factors in the assassination of reality, but ultimately we have these cunts because Zuckerberg gave a platform to perennial losers.

> Mainstream Christianity gave us Trump, so it's not exactly the moral foundation it claimed to be.

I think it's worth taking a closer look at what Trump is to the American and religious right. Some people think he's their savior, and that they approve of his actions. I don't. I think he's their champion, in the historical sense - a champion is one who fights for you. A champion is not above a king, but is useful, admired, and dear. I think the usefulness of Trump was proportional to the number of culture wars that the American Christian population was losing a decade ago, and is now winning. Some of those battles were dumb, like even AOC deleted her pronouns after the last election, but the fact that they were being fought meant that people needed someone effective to fight for them, and the most skilled fighter was Trump.

> There are plenty of ... factions that could potentially salvage it, but how will any of them get traction?

I think they need to figure out how to provide the most value possible to the population, and I think that following the teachings of Jesus is integral to this. I also think there are a number of things that must yet be figured out by trial and error.

It is however still a specific statement about one portion of the US political landscape. Lots of correct statement look wrong when you distort their intended scope.

How long until this gets flagged into oblivion and conveniently forgotten? Posts that shine our Dear Leader in a negative light are unacceptable here.

I’m sensing a shift. His base loves being on the outside. Now he has a trifecta and three and a half more years of power. It can’t be any more inside than that. Hopefully his influence starts to severely decline after each unforgivable action, like pardoning fraudsters who have close relations to his administration

Have you read the Katie Johnson court documents? I don’t think it really gets anymore unforgivable than that, yet here we are.

I don't think it's about disrespecting the Dear Leader so much as a general policy that this is for tech and startups rather than politics.

Sure, but that's applied unfairly. For example: the Charlie Kirk killing was front page for a substantial amount of time but other topics related to free speech or corruption are flagged and demoted quickly.

So, who loses money here and why aren't they upset? And are they important enough to worry the president. Those of us without stock aren't direct victims here, but someone must be. Bosch is mentioned in one story, I wonder what they're doing. My observation is lots of friends of the president are being forgiven crime, such as the J6ers, who if you believe the documentaries were violent toward the police, but the police aren't minding the pardons?

Trump is a master in captivating people to cast aside their values and go all in for Dear Leader. I bet many of the people who were conned are still supporters, and eagerly asking for another serving of Kool-aid.

One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".

I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.

Former shareholders, whoever currently holds the assets of the company as Nikola is in bankruptcy. Unless those people buy influence, they’re worthless to the current admin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/sec-trump-cle...

Each of the above guys did the smart thing of buying influence (Milton retained the attorney general’s brother as his lawyer, for example). In the past you’d have to hide that better, but now it’s out in the open.

One of the guys mentioned in the article is now cleared to work on his new crypto venture. Of course.

Edit: not to “both sides” this, but it is interesting and mentioned in that NYT article that Biden pardoned a guy involved in a multi-billion dollar ponzi after serving 10 years (with 10 to go). Found an article from 2008 showing that the Bidens were linked with the firm. Not as direct of a quid pro quo but more the standard back scratching …

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/stanford-reportedly...

Commuting the remaining 4 years of a 17 year sentence (based on an 85% federal minimum) and leaving the financial penalties intact for someone who apparently had jointly marketed a hedge fund 20 years prior with a family member isn’t remotely the same as preemptively pardoning someone to save them $200M in fines and all prison time after they gave your campaign $2M.

So much corruption

What are the strategies here?

Possibly a more extreme one, but I got citizenship elsewhere.

Australia taxes more, make no mistake, and the earning potential is less. Living in Australia though was the biggest improvement to quality life I've ever had. I've lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, SF, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney, and Sydney is #1 by such a large margin it shocked me.

My taxes went to funding public transportation that works. They funded government services like ServiceNSW that made me shocked how bad the DMV experiences were in the states. There's nationalized healthcare where I no longer had to worry if my friends could afford healthcare. The government has plenty of its own issues, but none of them felt as on the edge of the event horizon as US politics do.

I felt safe in Australia. With how things are again, I'm so glad I hold a passport with a kangaroo.

Very smart, I will get Canadian citizenship

Do you work for a US company in Australia?

> Do you work for a US company in Australia?

I worked for Atlassian at the time, so kinda both. An Australian company fiscally located in the US.

Depends on your set of values.

"It has also been reported that Trevor Milton gave $920,000 to Mr. Trump’s political campaign (or $1.8 million combined with his wife) and was represented in this case by Pam Bondi’s brother."

Cool and normal.

Hindenburg was wise to pack up shop ahead of this administration. This is a greenlight for fraud.

I realise now you were most likely referring to Hindenburg Research

https://hindenburgresearch.com/

But some may find amusing my initial interpretation, that this was an oblique reference to Paul von Hindenburg effectively abdicating to a different government (which has been likened by some to the current USA leadership).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

Yes, I'm referring to Hindenburg Research, apologies. They were the ones who initially exposed Milton and called it quits earlier this year, presumably because they foresaw a regulatory environment where fraud was no longer reliably prosecuted.

I had the same thought as GP though, thought it was very clever.

Paul never abdicated or willingly ceded power. He became too senile to understand what was happening around him. The fact this was hidden to the Germans at the time and it looked like nazi support hides the reality.

Really interesting how the thesis for short investigation as a investment strategy relied on

1) investors caring that management is lying and being unwilling to invest in known fraud and

2) the United States being a nation of laws.

Both seemed like solid bets as recently as a decade ago

When the person enforcing the rules is bribable, all criminals need to do is make sure they steal enough to pay themselves and the bribe.

Someone should tell Trevor that a pardon doesn’t mean you weren’t guilty. He apparently missed that detail.

For all practical purposes it does

Potential investors might not see it that way.

I've seen these driving around Los Angeles and I'm always surprised. They actually kind of made it. lol

> However, last month, he argued that the bankrupcy plan does not fully reflect the presidential pardon he received.

> The filing last month noted that “President Trump expressly decided here that Milton is factually innocent, the pardon did, contrary to the debtors’ assertions, wipe the slate clean.”

Ok so it's maybe not the very most important of the things that people have claimed the president has the power to do, but it sounds like this guy is saying not only does the pardon mean he's "innocent" but that he doesn't _owe money to people_? B/c the presidential pardon power is also an ability to declare what debts everyone does and doesn't have?

That’s what it means to be a totalitarian leader.

The US is really in the worst of both worlds: it's a petrostate, the world's leading fossil fuel producer. With that comes all the tendencies for corrupt authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. However, we don't get the customary low direct taxes. In fact, the taxes are going up on the populace, significantly, (via tariffs) almost in lockstep with the increasingly brazen corruption.

Norway is a petro-state but is well governed and democratic. I think petroleum is an accelerant but the fire of democratic backsliding/authoritarianism has to already exist in the first place. We took it for granted the institutions and traditions that safeguarded our government and didn't really ensure those are kept healthy.

A well-governed, democratic petro-state that has been very, very careful to keep much of anyone there from getting too high on their own supply: unlike just about any other petro-state, the state's cut of petroleum revenues do not go straight out - it all goes into a permanent fund (Government Pension Fund of Norway), with a maximum of 3% being allowed to go towards current spending. Norway's domestic fuel taxes are actually higher than their neighbors, and Norwegians still have to pay VAT and income tax like the rest of Europe... though they still haven't joined the EU (but their EEA membership means that they agreed to conform to a lot of EU laws and standards)

The most forward and obvious difference is Norway runs it's oil as a state enterprise so there's less outside influence created by the money. It's not perfect and depends on strong institutions and norms to keep from looking like Saudi oil money but imo having it be state run definitely helps.

Yes, I think the bigger problem we have in the US is the lack of trust. The country was founded on the idea that you shouldn't trust your government at all. That concept is enshrined in our constitution with the 2nd amendment.

Not saying people should blindly trust their government, but we went for the other end of the spectrum instead, which is similarly unhealthy.

Norway is a kingdom with royal family. Democracy is for the peaceful times. It's not full kingdom like ME but royal family directly have special laws that protect them. So not a full democracy.

I think you'd be hard pressed to get most people to agree to that strict of a definition where Norway wouldn't be considered a democracy. It's easy to pick at things like "someone has immunity in court" as unequal, but that kind of thing is typically considered compatible with a democracy. Same with grants, titles, ceremonial roles, etc - so long as the voters choices about such things aren't being suppressed it's pretty solidly in the "democracy" camp - which isn't mutually exclusive with having a decorative king.

I'm not sure what the reference to "democracy is for peace" is about, unless you count Nazi occupation and rule as the same government or something.

"King Harald holds the rank of General in the Army and Air Force, and of Admiral in the Navy. He is the nation's highest-ranking officer."

It's easy to verify and see who will lead during non peace times. Thank you for your attention.

https://www.royalcourt.no/artikkel.html?tid=28731&sek=27277

I'm not sure which particular passage you're referring to, but keep in mind that page is basically a puff piece about the kings ceremonial roles. He does not actually control the government, act as the leader of the military, etc in the same way his title is "king" but any non-ceremonial rights belong to the elected prime minister. If he tried to name someone else as prime minister during the transition it wouldn't actually mean anything as it's a ceremony. Etc, unless you feel there is a specific passage which the role is not ceremonial, but it's difficult to explain how the whole thing is in response to a single link and no context.

This is nonsense. Norway is a full democracy according to the Economist Democracy Index, where it has ranked #1 the last couple of decades.

Norway's government is elected through open, free elections. While the king is nominally the head of state, this is a symbolic position with extremely limited powers, and the king has not played a meaningful role in politics since World War 2. The royal family has no power over the government.

this does not sound limited powers? sounds literally opposite with proof. see quote :

"King Harald holds the rank of General in the Army and Air Force, and of Admiral in the Navy. He is the nation's highest-ranking officer."

https://www.royalcourt.no/artikkel.html?tid=28731&sek=27277

Those are not political appointments, and have no bearing on Norway's status as a democracy. Those military roles are largely symbolic. While nominally "commander in chief", this isn't the same way the U.S. president is CiC; the de facto head of the armed forces is not the king, but the chief of defense.

As head of state, the king has a very limited role in political affairs.

The key difference is in Norway the government owns the majority stake in their petroleum companies. Here, they are freely traded among capitalists.

I think, to be a petrostate, you need to derive a huge part of your economy from pumping valuable stuff out of the ground. Fossil fuels in the US are like ... 6% of the US economy? Not nothing in absolute terms - if there was a "United States of Fossil Fuels", it would be the 12th biggest nation by GDP in the world. But still, America derives a vast majority of its economy from non-fossil fuels

That might be the case, but as far as the political party with a complete, iron-clad grip on the neck of the government is concerned, every other industry is an afterthought. For example, solar and wind are essential parts of an energy portfolio for domestic industry. These are being taken out back and kneecapped with billy clubs to prop up oil/gas/coal.

If the country isn't a petrostate it's certainly cosplaying one to a psychotic degree.

Imagine if that 6% of the GDP fed back into social services, education, and other government programs that benefit people.

About 17% of the GDP is paid to the federal government in taxes. Nationalizing oil production is equivalent to lowering the effective federal tax rate by 35%.

Nationalizing oil has been tried quite a few places with wildly variable results. In the worst case, you get Venezuela, in the best you get something like UAE where the citizens basically only have jobs if they get bored or want to play police to lord over the foreigners.

What about Alaska?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

6% of gdp does not mean profit

they fully control the federal government, doing exactly what they said they would do by flooding courts and firing appointees who are insufficiently loyal. they don't think they will need to ever deal with free elections ever again, and they think we're too stupid to do anything about it (bonus: decades and decades of underfunding public education means they might be right).

Take from the poor, give to the rich. It's an Ayn Randian gerontocracy.

For anyone here planning on doing corporate fraud, just make sure you leave a $1-2MM line item for regulatory assistance.

By "regulatory assistance" I assume you mean "campaign donations"?

No need to be that circumspect in 2025 - no one will investigate you; just funnel the money directly to a family member via a consulting gig, buy their shitcoin, or donate to a "charitable foundation" whose mission is to funnel money upwards

No we don't even have to be that subtle any more just call it a gratuity and the supreme courts says it's AOK to give obvious bribes so long as no one provably said "I'll give you $X dollars for Y action". It's painful how blatantly the highest court in the land has been captured by the same people giving these bribes.

> just call it a gratuity

That's why tips are tax-free!

By "campaign donations" I assume you mean "bribes and kickbacks"?

this clearly did not work for SBF

His mistake was giving more to the Dems, it's why he's landed a 25-year prison sentence under a Dem administration.

Remember when half this forum was convinced that both parties are equally corrupt, based on their feeling that he will certainly walk?

(That half of it is still convinced they are equally corrupt, but since their guy won and the ends justify the means, they no longer feel the need to articulate reasons for why they would feel that way.)

But Hunter Biden’s laptop!

“I don’t know him, but I was… they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” the President said then.

The filing last month noted that “President Trump expressly decided here that Milton is factually innocent, the pardon did, contrary to the debtors’ assertions, wipe the slate clean.”

Absolutely disgusting. Now he's trying to pull 69 million in legal fees from the company.

"Milton, 42, and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission."

https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-...

You have to respect that Trump is not even trying to hide anything

No, I really don't.

Next they will let Elizabeth Holmes go and I doubt Elon will ever see the walls of a prison for the crimes he has committed. At least while this fascist government is in charge and Elon doesn't piss off trump in some way.

> Holmes

they're trying. https://theinventors.com / https://theranoslabs.com are up on billboards around LA with 'Elizabeth Holmes Innocent' marketing.

I don't know about "they". The billboards and the attempt to resurrect Theranos seems like a bizarro self-promotion stunt by a single guy named Ryan El-Hosseiny, who's been photoshopping himself into photos of Elizabeth Holmes, claiming the title of "CEO and Inventor", and insisting that he's known as "the Steve Jobs of medical labs" despite having no history in the medical industry.

yeah 'they' was a bit of a generalization. just pointing out that there's already weird stuff afoot with Holmes.

But has Holmes got any money left?

What crimes would Elon ever see prison time for? And by crimes here I mean actual felony violations of criminal law that normally result in prison, not "crimes" that HN commenters typically accuse people of that are actually torts or sometimes just things they consider immoral.

He likely violated the terms of his visa, which is a crime.

“I had to [stay in school]..otherwise I’d get kicked out of the country.” ... “since I already had my undergrad, I could..get an H1-B visa” (not correct, he had no degree in 1995, so he's already on record lying about many aspects of his visa and schooling situation)

"I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work," adding to The Post, "I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever." You cannot work "supporting whatever" on an F1, exceptions like OPT are restricted to specific programs. Musk has (more than once) admitted to violating the terms of his visa and working illegally.

> Derek Proudian, a board member for the Musks' former internet startup Zip2, which they founded in late 1995, told the Post, "Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.," adding, "We don't want our founder being deported."

Musk had no degree in 1995. And it sounds like he was on an F1. If those are both true he was working illegally.

Snopes has a lot more details https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-undocumented-immigran...

>actual felony violations of criminal law that normally result in prison

Has anyone gone to prison for 30 year old visa irregularities? I'd say it's not normal.

For starters, he manipulated Tesla stock many times and defrauded customers on the pretext of selling fully Self-driving cars. Also, how many deaths have been caused by that?

This is a big one, but was settled https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/18/business/tesla-black-worker-h...

> a Black female employee who claimed a manager at its Fremont, California, plant sometimes greeted workers by saying “welcome to the plantation” or “welcome to the slave house.”

Well that is extremely inappropriate, but it is neither a crime nor was it committed by Elon Musk.

As for your other claim is there ever an instance where Elon Musk claimed to sell fully self driving cars? Because I haven't heard it. When Tesla sells those cars it makes you sign a contract stating specifically that they aren't able to do that, and then on top of that puts in safety features that don't allow the software to even be active if the driver is not attentive.

Illegal immigration and investor fraud would be two. Elon has told more lies in official investor communications than others have gone to prison for.

Wow. I did follow the case closely at the time. Trevor Milton is such an obvious fraudster. I could't understand how anybody believed him. Just knowing a tiny bit about technology is enough to tell that he was just talking complete nonsense in the videos that i saw. Now fraudsters are pardoning each other. The level of corruption is really unbelievable.

If you knew this company was a fraud / grift, at least take a bet on shorting it all the way down like I did [0].

Plenty of companies out there that are just plain frauds like Nikola waiting to be discovered.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773

You need some very deep pockets though to last long enough. I remember it took years from reading that Nikola is questionable to it going down. Same for Theranos. And Tesla is not a fraud but probably extremely overvalued. But it keeps going up.

Whilst Elon isn't committing outright fraud, he toes close to the line with his promissory sounding announcements and so on.

In any case, the fact we're even talking about this kind of behaviour speaks volumes.

Be a bad person and a scumbag, Trump will pardon you. And all the religious nutjobs will still vote for trump because all their moral crusades are complete lies and nonsense. Pure hypocrisy.

I followed Nikola from the beginning and it was patently obvious that the company was a scam. And they managed to get the company to the stock market and valued at many billions. Totally insane.

The way they did it was basically to run a huge amount of Facebook ads, but they were selling the stock, not the product. And once the stock goes up, everybody just gets in a mode 'surely if it goes up it will continue to go up'.

They played on all the pent up 'hydrogen' is the real future bullshit that people have been talking about for decades. He was also pretty good at reading the social media and always pivoting the the new thing.

The ended up raising such an absurd amount of money they legit had to start building a real company (try to).

I feel the worst for Nikola Tesla in all of this, having his good name ruined by two fraudulent companies.

All the marketing for Nikola Trucks' stock was aimed at people with no background in tech or science. It was brilliantly diabolical. Fuck Trevor Milton.

Why would this be of importance given Trump already pardoned numerous violent felons and other cronies? Was it the e-vehicle association? Was it due to retail had not realized there are two systems of laws, one for retail and another for important people?

> “I don’t know him, but I was… they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” the President said then.

Disgusting

Crime does pay , but only if you know the right people. Just having clout does not always work if you're seen as damaged goods or made an example of, like in the case of SBF.

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