Trevor Milton’s merry boardmen

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Trevor Milton might be waiting to start a four-year prison sentence for defrauding investors (after his smol bean legal defence oddly failed) but that hasn’t stopped him from plotting his next move. 

And sometimes you have to go backwards to move forwards. The founder of Nikola Motors — who still owns 4.4 per cent of the company — has nominated five dissident directors to its board in an apparent attempt to regain influence over a company he was ousted from almost four years ago. 

Nikola was unimpressed. In a statement last week it bluntly noted its founder’s criminal conviction and an unpaid $165mn judgment debt he owes the company, and argued that Milton’s board nominees were pretty much useless.

The director nominees have no public company experience, add no skills or experience to the board, and indisputably lack the depth of experience that the current Nikola board members bring to the Company. Additionally, it is the Company’s belief that the director nominees lack the expertise or knowledge needed to navigate the complexities of a zero-emissions trucking and energy infrastructure business.

Being fair-minded, scrupulous journalists we wanted to see if this was true, so we did some digging into Milton’s merry men: Cole Cannon, Derek Johnson, Hans Peterson, Paul Southam and Dave Sparks.

Most of them are mystifyingly difficult to track down, but one that really stands out is Dave Sparks, or HeavyD as he is better known. He’s actually a pretty big deal on YouTube, where he runs a channel with more than three and a half million subscribers.

Here’s his YouTube bio: 

Do you wanna see the real side and personal lives of Heavy D and Diesel Dave from Diesel Brothers and experience some of the wildest vehicles, stunts, and pranks the world has ever seen? . . . if your answer is no, go follow Dr Phil, if your answer is yes . . . hit that SUBSCRIBE button now!

A guy who performs the “wildest” pranks the world has ever seen sounds like a guy you want to be making decisions about a company — especially if that company is Nikola.

HeavyD has more than 600 videos on YouTube but one particular one — titled ‘We Found a $26 Million Dollar Totally Off-Grid Mansion- Let’s Go Inside’ — caught our attention.

HeavyD explains at the start of the video, which was posted just before Milton was about to start his trial, that “it belongs to a guy that I know and he just put it on the market”. 

You’ve guessed it: that guy is Milton. He bought Riverbend Ranch for $32.5mn in 2019, setting a record for the most expensive property purchase in Utah at the time, shortly after Nikola received a $3bn valuation from investors. 

HeavyD is actually very familiar with Nikola. Here he is in an interview in October 2022 talking about his “buddy” Trevor Milton “who is actually currently in trial in New York for a bunch of stuff that happened”. Which is a fun way of describing criminal fraud.

He says Milton wanted him to be the face behind Nikola’s Badger pick-up truck, which was supposed to be the company’s pièce de résistance. You may remember that this was the truck that Milton famously said would have a drinking fountain — much to the surprise of Nikola engineers. That led Milton to google whether you “can drink water from a fuel cell”.

The Badger died an untimely death in 2020 and Nikola returned all deposits to customers who had put in orders. Yet HeavyD indicates in the interview that it could be resurrected and claims he’s been working with the Nikola team to keep it alive. We’ve asked Nikola for a comment and will update with that once it lands.

If that’s right, then HeavyD was an interesting guy to choose to consult on “the world’s most advanced zero-emission” pick-up truck. His big YouTube following is largely down to a reality television show he’s in as half of the Diesel Brothers duo.

The series follows him and a guy called Diesel Dave “as they build big, bad trucks, pull elaborate pranks and push the limits with new stunts”. Basically they juice up diesel pick-ups and sell them. One of the practices they use is called “rolling coal” — intentionally modifying the exhaust so that it releases huge clouds of black smoke.

A non-profit called the Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment took issue with this and filed a lawsuit alleging that the modified vehicles could create black smoke which is “one of the most toxic types of pollution there is”. HeavyD and his crew were ordered to pay a six figure fine by an appeals court.

Milton must have been impressed with HeavyD’s representation though. Cole Cannon, one of his proposed Nikola board members, is a bandanna-wearing lawyer who acted on behalf of the Diesel Brothers in relation to this lawsuit.

He sounds awesome:

Mr. Cole Cannon, Esq. loves business first and the law second. The law is a means to achieve his clients’ business needs. Mr. Cannon founded Cannon Law Group, PLLC, in the dead of the recession in 2008 on the premise an attorney’s job is to provide value, not just bill hours. Mission accomplished. For over a decade, Cannon Law has steadily provided real value to its clients as they navigate litigation, mergers, acquisitions, employment matters, non-competes, marketing campaigns, and all forms of business negotiations.

Mr. Cannon is a negotiator at heart, not the soft type, but the “speak softly and carry a big stick” type that Teddy Roosevelt preached about. Mr. Cannon is ready to tackle his clients’ hard problems, the kind of issues people hate to think about but need to address.

The rest seem to remain ciphers — Milton hasn’t actually filed a proxy statement so there’s zero information aside from their names — so let Alphaville know if you’re familiar with any of them. We’re rooting for Milton’s men.