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Former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton defends his Board nominees

Miljøstiftelsen ZERO, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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Former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton is fighting back against the Board of Directors’ decision to reject his five director nominees. The Nikola Board announced its rejection of Milton’s director nominees earlier this month. 

Milton had nominated Cole Cannon, Derek Johnson, Hans Peterson, Paul Southam, and Dave Sparks, who runs the HeavyD YouTube channel, for Nikola’s Board of Directors. The current Nikola Board cited several reasons behind its rejection of Milton’s nominees, from their alleged lack of experience in a public company to a lack of skills. 

“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,” Nikola’s current Board wrote in a press release

In a press release, M&M Residual, LLC, an entity connected to Milton, together with its affiliates, argued that the former CEO’s director nominees should be considered. As per the shareholder group, which owns about 4.5% of Nikola stock, Milton’s selections should help the company fix its issues and put it back on a path to value creation. The group argued that Nikola’s leadership today has shown subpar performance, with the company’s stock nearly getting wiped out.

“Since taking over as Chair in 2020, CEO Steve Girsky and his Board have overseen a staggering and consistent decline in Nikola’s stock from $30+ per share to a delisting Nasdaq price of less than seventy cents per share… For approximately four years now, the Board has overseen operational underperformance, value destructive acquisitions, the breakdown of the Iveco Group-Nikola partnership, the loss of meaningful European market share and the sale of key assets while taking on debt. These actions (among other concerning missteps surrounding safety and disclosures) have resulted in the destruction of nearly 100% of stockholder value.

Concerningly, the Board also diluted Nikola shares to the tune of an additional 800 million last year, so that over 1.6 billion total shares are now authorized with over 1 billion shares in circulation. After destroying significant value and diluting stockholders as Chair, Steve Girsky then took the helm as CEO in August 2023. Under Mr. Girsky’s leadership, stockholders suffered an approximate 72% decline in value. No matter how you look at it, over all relevant time periods this management team and Board have obliterated stockholder value and put our Company at risk,” the stockholder group noted. 

The group claimed that it had been approached by numerous stockholders who wish to see the current leadership of Nikola replaced. M&M Residual, LLC and its affiliates’ press release also noted that Milton’s five picks for Nikola’s director post have already started working on an operational strategy that would improve the company. 

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“Our Group has been approached by numerous stockholders who want to see CEO Steve Girsky and his Board replaced with high-integrity individuals. This is a reasonable request, especially considering Nikola recently disclosed that substantial doubt exists regarding its ability to continue as a going concern through the next 12 months… In stark contrast to the current Board, our independent slate includes proven founders and executives who collectively possess the operational, supply chain, and electric vehicle experience that we believe will be required to initiate a value-enhancing turnaround at Nikola. Our five-member slate has already begun working on an operating strategy that considers the interests of stockholders, employees, partners, and customers,” the shareholder group noted. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most

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Rendering of Elon Musk overlooking a Starship fleet (Credit: Grok)

SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.

Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.

SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles

The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”

When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.

The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.

None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.

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The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it

Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.

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Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.

The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.

The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville

The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.

For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.

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