I recently listened to an interview that Tucker Carlson conducted with Trevor Milton, the founder and former CEO of Nikola, a once high-flying startup in the electric vehicle space. In 2020, Nikola had a market capitalization of $30 billion, which was greater than that of the Ford Motor Company’s market cap of $28 billion at the time. According to business media reports at the time, Nikola was to revolutionize long-haul trucking in the same way that Tesla did with E.V.s. However, Nikola ran afoul of SEC regulations and Trevor was indicted for fraud. He reached a plea bargain conviction with federal prosecutors, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $1 million. In March 2025, he received a pardon from Trump.

Tucker’s interview with Trevor is over an hour and covers the whole saga of his meteoric rise and precipitous fall. I started watching it with an eye for inaccuracies and overstatements. About eleven minutes into the interview, I was struck by something that Trevor said. The transcript of the interview reads as follows.

TUCKER CARLSON (00:11:13): So it takes a lot of energy to produce hydrogen.

TREVOR MILTON (00:11:17): But it’s okay, because we have more energy than we know what to do with. Realistically, we do, because for instance, the grid can only handle so much energy. And so if you look at California, California will actually pay you to take their energy at parts of the day because they have too much of it from solar. Solar is fantastic in the West Coast and even in some other areas, but the problem is, is the sun comes out, it loads the whole grid full of energy and then they have to start dumping it. So one great thing about hydrogen is, is that you can buffer the grid. You can say, send anything you want to the grid, doesn’t matter, because any excess we can produce hydrogen. And you can suck out hundreds of megawatts of energy from the grid producing hydrogen and storing it. And then you can store it as liquid as well. And then, you can transport it from there. And that was the whole idea of hydrogen. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, but it’s a solution to the major problems we have in America.

Nothing that Trevor said in that passage about utilizing excess electricity generation from solar to produce hydrogen that can then be stored and transported is factually incorrect. Those things can be done. The real issue is the economic feasibility of such a scheme. The short answer is that it is not feasible for a myriad of reasons centered on the costs of producing, storing and transporting hydrogen. Trevor’s statement is misleading, but to be fair, I have heard Elon Musk and others make similar claims. Nevertheless, it triggered my bulls**t detector and raised my skepticism of him to DEFCON 3.

I paused the interview for a moment and did a quick search to find out which of his past statements got him into trouble with the SEC. I discovered the following.

According to the U.S. indictment and DOJ sentencing memo:

Anyone of these deceptions would get him into trouble with his investors and the SEC. Taken together, they amount to a damning indictment.

I continued with Tucker’s interview to see what Trevor had to say about the allegations. He had a handy explanation for each, but overall, he did not come across as credible and raised my skepticism of him to DEFCON 2. At no point did Tucker push back on anything that he was saying and because of that, his story started to take on an unreal quality, like someone relating a tale of being abducted by aliens.  In fact, he sounded and acted like Randy Quaid’s character, Russell Case, in Independence Day. At that point, I went to DEFCON 1.

During the dotcom era, I ran into guys like Trevor trying to raise venture capital. None of them were nearly as successful as Trevor in raising funds, but many had the same charm that masked deceit below the surface. Often, if I gave them enough rope, they would hang themselves by making claims that violated the laws of physics. I remember having one embarrassing moment with a CEO, when I asked him to explain how his scheme exceeded the theoretical maximum data rate for reliable communication over a noisy channel as defined by Shannon’s Law.  It was followed by complete silence in the room. 

At no time in his interview did Tucker come close to embarrassing his guest. Because Tucker sees Trevor as an innocent from the heartland challenging corrupt coastal interests, he is blind to his obvious flaws.  I ask the reader to be weary of anyone coming from the electric vehicle space who is trying to remake themselves as a folk hero.

Image generated by AI with prompt from author.