Lady Lus, Rubber BouiphantWith the news being a firehouse of awful, you may have missed this one from the auto sector: The CEO of Nikola got a pardon… & the circumstances are shady as hell
For those unfamiliar, Nikola was a fuel cell big rig company that turned out to be entirely smoke and mirrors. Most famously they rolled a non-working truck down a hill and tilting the camera to make it look like level ground, and passing it off as a fully-functional prototype, but they also got caught by having GVWR numbers and various calculations on a whiteboard that contradicted their public claims in the background of one of their own PR videos, and the CEO I believe hired family at high salaries for vague executive roles and bought a bunch of fancy shit for himself.
https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-pardon-3fcebb0a3820cecb205656f2dc3f6764
Convicted of bilking investors, Nikola founder and Trump donor gets a presidential pardon
The founder of an electric car start-up sentenced to prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology has been pardoned by President Donald Trump, potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution that prosecutors were seeking for bamboozled investors. Nikola founder Trevor Milton was sentenced last year to four years in prison, though he had not been incarcerated pending an appeal. Nikola, which was a hot start-up and rising star on Wall Street before becoming enmeshed in Milton’s scandal, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February.
franable