Originally published at: Founder of EV startup Nikola sentenced to 4 years imprisonment for fraud | Boing Boing
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All these rich grifting White assholes make such a mockery out of Nikola Tesla’s good name.
ETA:
The man was far from perfect; but he was still a legit genius who actually invented things, instead of just exploiting and profiting off the work of others.
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Nikola, was sentenced today to 4 years in prison following his 2002 guilty verdict on fraud charges
Surely 2020 not 2002
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To be fair, Tesla was no stranger to the use of bullshit in the service of raising funds. He would make stuff up and try to sell it to investors. He often didn’t deliver. And he had a weird thing about pigeons.
On the other hand, he was really a genius who did make substantial contributions to science. So there’s that.
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Unlike Musk or this dude in the post.
That was my initial point.
Thanks ever so much for expounding upon it without any solicitation, and have a great day.
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Again, again and again, snake oil salesmen getting billions in investment with just gibberish and smoke. Meanwhile honest entrepeneurs cannot raise a dollar. And the industry does not learn. Or it is on purpose, who knows.
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Edison is long dead. He doesn’t need a publicist to shit-talk Tesla, who is also long dead.
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How is Musk still walking around a free man?
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Greed loves bullshit. Value prefers real innovation coupled with industry.
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He’s the richest man in the world and we live in an autocracy?
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He has done a lot of dumb and antisocial shit, but I’m not sure he has committed any outright fraud. I think he has had a lot of SEC violations, but those ar enornally handled by large fines so him merely needing to pay a “bunch” of money is not out of the ordinary. Many people who violate SEC regulations to make money as opposed to making a dumb joke are fined smaller amounts than they profit on their crimes.
I’m not sure he has any significant criminal violations, and I don’t think he has committed any sort of fraud where he says “we have X” and then in fact doesn’t have it. He has talked about making X by a date and missed by many years but that isn’t generally considered fraud. He has quote prices for unreeled products that turn out to be wildly optimistic, but again that doesn’t rise to the level of fraud.
He has talked about how cheaply his boring company’s machine will eventually be able to dig fantastic tunnels for at some point in the future. Meanwhile they have never produced a boring machine, but they bought a conventional very costly one and made a few holes. As far as I know he hasn’t said they have made a boring machine that does anything in particular. Generally you get a lot of leeway on forward looking statements.
It is even possible that many of them are good guesses not total BS (like maybe the $37k starting price on the CyberTruck that missed by a factor of two has real engineering estimates behind it).
I think a lot of the alleged labor violations when he took over Twitter and ruined it are all punished with fines, not jail time (and are as far as I know unproven although likely true).
So largely I think he is not in jail due to careful (or lucky) choice of crimes not punished by jail time. While Nikola’s CEO decided fraud was his path to glory, and that one does tend to get punished with jail time at least when it is flagrant and repeated.
Moral of the story: screw employees not investors.
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Word salad.
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“I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
… “full self driving” 
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This makes me feel like someone at some point mentioned the in vehicle touch screen system used HTML 5 in some capacity and he just ran with it.
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Doing, making, or selling things that end up hurting and/or killing people isn’t illegal.
But lying to rich people is.
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i also love this part
Hindenburg said the truck was “towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.” It was then used in a video, which Nikola said was created by a third party, in which the truck appeared to be driving on its own propulsion on flat roads
at least tesla’s cars can move under their own power… some of the time
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Musk seems like the rare combination of being both a liar and a bullshitter.
And one of those is especially fraudulent.
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I wonder if this is a case of rich fraudster going to jail because a richer fraudster wanted it so.
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