Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola Corporation and a former Summit County resident, was sentenced Monday in federal court in New York City to four years in prison and ordered to forfeit property in Utah for defrauding investors in his electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicle company.
In addition to forfeiting the ranch, the 4,678-acre Wasatch Creeks Ranch in Morgan County, Milton — who formerly lived in Oakley and is now a resident of Alpine, Wyo. — was ordered to pay a fine of $1 million and sentenced to three years of supervised release. U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos will set restitution at a future proceeding.
Milton remains free on $100 million bail, which was set during pretrial proceedings in 2021. A date for him to begin his prison sentence has not been set yet.
Prosecutors alleged Milton, 41, induced non-professional investors to buy shares of the corporation by making false and misleading statements about Nikola’s product and technology development directly to the public through social media and in interviews. They said retail investors lost more than $660 million.
“Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again — on social media, on television, on podcasts, and in print. But today’s sentence should be a warning to start-up founders and corporate executives everywhere — ‘fake it till you make it’ is not an excuse for fraud, and if you mislead your investors, you will pay a stiff price,” Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release.
Milton, who was described in a 2021 indictment as a serial entrepreneur from Utah with no formal background in engineering, started Nikola in 2015 and was the largest single owner of its stock. A jury convicted him in October 2022 of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud and acquitted him of a second count of securities fraud.
His scheme allegedly began about November 2019 and was carried out until at least September 2020. Milton made false claims about nearly all aspects of Nikola’s business, according to the news release, which cited court documents and trial evidence.
In 2016, at a large event that was broadcast on the internet, Milton said the company had built a prototype hydrogen-powered semi-truck named Nikola One that “fully functions and works, which is incredible.”
“In fact, the Nikola One prototype was never completed and never functioned,” the release says. “Rather, the prototype was wholly missing significant parts, including gears and motors, and the control system (i.e., the system that communicates the driver’s directions to the vehicle) and other significant systems were missing or incomplete.”
A few years later, Milton published on Twitter, now called X, videos that appeared to show the vehicle driving on its own power down a road with no incline. But the news release says to film those clips, the truck was towed to the top of a hill, where the brake was released and the Nikola One rolled down the road.
The release says other false statements said Nikola had built the Badger, a pickup powered by electricity and hydrogen using the company’s parts and technology; the company was producing hydrogen and doing it at a reduced cost; and reservations for the future delivery of the trucks were binding orders totaling billions in revenue.
And in 2018, Milton misrepresented Nikola’s business to induce a Massachusetts investor to accept options to buy the company’s stock in lieu of cash for the purchase of the 4,600-acre Wasatch Creeks Ranch, according to the news release. The investor, Peter Hicks, was hesitant at first but eventually agreed to sell the ranch for $8.5 million in cash and stock options valued then, based on prevailing market price for the stock, at $8.5 million.
By the time Hicks could exercise his options, the stock’s value had decreased substantially because of the revelation of some of Milton’s lies in a report published by a short seller, court documents say. The options later became effectively worthless.