Nikola: The $13 Billion Truck That Rolled Downhill

At the height of the electric vehicle boom, a zero-emissions startup reached a 13-billion-dollar valuation, briefly worth more than Ford, without selling a single production truck. This episode unpacks Nikola Corporation and founder Trevor Milton, whose flagship promotional video showed a supposed hydrogen fuel cell semi cruising down a highway when the truck had no propulsion at all and was simply towed up a hill and allowed to roll down under gravity.We trace the mechanics of the deception: the real engineering challenge of electrifying heavy trucks, the SPAC merger that bypassed scrutiny, the GM partnership driven by corporate FOMO, and the financials showing 80,000 dollars in revenue, nearly half from solar panels on Milton's own house. From the Hindenburg report and the rolling truck video to the fraud conviction, the later pardon, the battery fires, and the 2025 bankruptcy, gravity ultimately won.Why hydrogen fuel cells genuinely appealed to the heavy trucking industryHow a SPAC merger let Nikola skip the scrutiny of a traditional IPOThe GM deal, the FOMO, and the comically thin revenue figuresThe Hindenburg report exposing the rolling-truck video as a fakeThe thermal runaway battery fires and the company's collapse into bankruptcy