“On the backs of those innocent investors taken in by his lies, he became a billionaire virtually overnight,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said in his opening statement in September.
Nikola’s stock price briefly added to over $90 per share in June 2020, a few days after it went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. For a short period, Nikola — a company with no revenue — was more valuable than the century-old Ford Motor.
However, Nikola’s shares plunged dramatically once Milton was forced out of the firm in September 2020, after the company’s board of directors found that some of the fraud allegations made by short-seller Hindenburg Research had merit.
