"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
Someone should be selling motivational posters with these kind of funny quotes from our dear "tech leaders". There should be a gallery of funny quotes to choose from so I can put them on my wall and feel better about myself.
Same!! I'd definitely consider buying some for myself, and perhaps also as gag-gifts for other tech friends lol. I happen to have access to amazon merch from forever ago, which doesn't have posters, but does allow throw pillows.... I might spend the weekend playing with one lol
Wow. Quotes like these really illustrate to me that I may have some massive blind spots and lack a lot of skills that help make people lots of money. This fellow is worth $3 billion and just spouts gibberish.
I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks. I have a pack of a few friends who have been doing this for years. I think most of their ideas are pretty awful, but who knows, maybe one day they'll be right?
Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.
That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.
It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.
Nearly all people value good articulation over intelligence. This is why people who interview well get jobs over people who do good work. It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't. And why Trevor Milton can bilk investors of claims about HTML5 supercomputers while nerds get brushed off talking about tensor-chip accelerated attention models.
The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.
Either corruption was always happening maximally, and we've finally begun to notice , or corruption has reached a new maximum.
Either way, it's maximum corruption.
And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.
I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.
We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.
This sounds a lot like Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens. You can just hear the frustrated aide trying to explain a concept to him in the simplest possible terms and then he totally mangles it.
The most important thing to note is that Trevor Milton, who plainly defrauded investors (rolling a model truck down an incline and calling it self powered), hired Bradley Bondi as his attorney.
Bradley Bondi is Pam Bondi's (yes the attorney general) brother.
Pam Bondi also famously took a bribe to allow trump off the hook before his 2016 run. Everything around trump is insanely corrupted by him. She was of course "cleared" of any wrongdoing in the situation, but it was extremely transparent: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-ag-pam-bondi-is-cleared...
How to know all you need to know about the level of corruption the US is suffering: compare the dearth of news articles regarding the president's net worth increase of $3 billion dollars since taking office with the plethora of news articles covering his wife's wardrobe choices.
I was about to ask just how evil he has to be to go out of his way to pardon this guy, but then here we are, realizing just how evil and corrupt he really is.
Beautiful pay to play at work here. The tech leaders saw this way ahead of time and so aligned themselves with the administration and kissed the ring. They can get away with anything they want. At the very least, they know they will be able to get all regulations off their backs and get favorable regulations as well if they pay their way through.
Is it legal to teach these kinds (in my personal opinion) of skills in Business School: either extortion (administration threatens / complains, companies pay, administration stops complaining), or the seeming corruption illustrated (again IMO) here?
- Extortion example: Trump in a White House Lawn gaggle interview this week complained at / threatened Australia's ABC reporter and then Australia itself with additional tarriffs, after the reporter asked about loss of freedom of speech relating to FCC complaining & threatening "big stick or little stick, you decide" to ABC/Disney who needed FCC's near-future approval for a pending business-merger, which ABC/Disney then terminated a thorn in the side of the President .. comedian Jimmy Kimmel. It's pretty clear, in my personal opinion, that this was extortion
Essentially what corporate law is all about. Huge drain on innovation and an accelerant for corruption. We’ve grown so used to it now that we don’t even see it. Agree to terms, move on. Hear about some class-action lawsuit relevant to you, but never get anything from it. Nowadays we don’t even have a right to class-action in most agreements we sign with corporations. The same vultures in corporate law are making their way into public law. It’s like mixing bleach and ammonia.
It turns out all of the "institutions", customs and traditions, not technically enforced by law, had an important effect on restraining corruption. Turns out they were only really enforced by the public, but with the general (intentional, IMO) erosion in faith in the government and institutions, the public no longer cares.
Well, many of these actions are illegal. But law is not self-enforcing. If POTUS is the origin of the corruption and his party in Congress doesn't impeach or otherwise constrain, then he's allowed to do whatever he wants.
> It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
> It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
> It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
> It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
> For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to whit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I'm always annoyed by that saying. It's basically an indictment of government power (and power in general), not just "conservatism." It could apply as well to Stalin and Mao as to Trump and the Bushes.
I’m sensing a shift. His base loves being on the outside. Now he has a trifecta and three and a half more years of power. It can’t be any more inside than that. Hopefully his influence starts to severely decline after each unforgivable action, like pardoning fraudsters who have close relations to his administration
Sure, but that's applied unfairly. For example: the Charlie Kirk killing was front page for a substantial amount of time but other topics related to free speech or corruption are flagged and demoted quickly.
So, who loses money here and why aren't they upset? And are they important enough to worry the president. Those of us without stock aren't direct victims here, but someone must be. Bosch is mentioned in one story, I wonder what they're doing. My observation is lots of friends of the president are being forgiven crime, such as the J6ers, who if you believe the documentaries were violent toward the police, but the police aren't minding the pardons?
Trump is a master in captivating people to cast aside their values and go all in for Dear Leader. I bet many of the people who were conned are still supporters, and eagerly asking for another serving of Kool-aid.
One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".
I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.
Former shareholders, whoever currently holds the assets of the company as Nikola is in bankruptcy. Unless those people buy influence, they’re worthless to the current admin.
Each of the above guys did the smart thing of buying influence (Milton retained the attorney general’s brother as his lawyer, for example). In the past you’d have to hide that better, but now it’s out in the open.
One of the guys mentioned in the article is now cleared to work on his new crypto venture. Of course.
Edit: not to “both sides” this, but it is interesting and mentioned in that NYT article that Biden pardoned a guy involved in a multi-billion dollar ponzi after serving 10 years (with 10 to go). Found an article from 2008 showing that the Bidens were linked with the firm. Not as direct of a quid pro quo but more the standard back scratching …
Commuting the remaining 4 years of a 17 year sentence (based on an 85% federal minimum) and leaving the financial penalties intact for someone who apparently had jointly marketed a hedge fund 20 years prior with a family member isn’t remotely the same as preemptively pardoning someone to save them $200M in fines and all prison time after they gave your campaign $2M.
Possibly a more extreme one, but I got citizenship elsewhere.
Australia taxes more, make no mistake, and the earning potential is less. Living in Australia though was the biggest improvement to quality life I've ever had. I've lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, SF, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney, and Sydney is #1 by such a large margin it shocked me.
My taxes went to funding public transportation that works. They funded government services like ServiceNSW that made me shocked how bad the DMV experiences were in the states. There's nationalized healthcare where I no longer had to worry if my friends could afford healthcare. The government has plenty of its own issues, but none of them felt as on the edge of the event horizon as US politics do.
I felt safe in Australia. With how things are again, I'm so glad I hold a passport with a kangaroo.
"It has also been reported that Trevor Milton gave $920,000 to Mr. Trump’s political campaign (or $1.8 million combined with his wife) and was represented in this case by Pam Bondi’s brother."
Readit News
"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-... - April 24, 2019
The Führer is never wrong.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardons-nikola-trevor-...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1395001/dl
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What skills does he have that I completely lack?
Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.
That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.
It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.
The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.
As George Carlin would say, it's a big club, and you ain't in it.
1. The ability to lie shamelessly.
2. Charisma.
3. Confidence.
The last two (or all three, really) can be combined into ‘salesmanship’, more or less.
You'd be amazed how "successful" one can be if willing to lie, cheat and/or steal.
It does not take any special skills to do this. All it takes is having no integrity.
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The ability to tell tall tales that are completely disconnected from reality. And be able to do so with utter confidence.
Either way, it's maximum corruption.
And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.
I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.
We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.
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Dead Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Dead Comment
Bradley Bondi is Pam Bondi's (yes the attorney general) brother.
- Extortion example: Trump in a White House Lawn gaggle interview this week complained at / threatened Australia's ABC reporter and then Australia itself with additional tarriffs, after the reporter asked about loss of freedom of speech relating to FCC complaining & threatening "big stick or little stick, you decide" to ABC/Disney who needed FCC's near-future approval for a pending business-merger, which ABC/Disney then terminated a thorn in the side of the President .. comedian Jimmy Kimmel. It's pretty clear, in my personal opinion, that this was extortion
Again, these are my personal opinions.
Essentially what corporate law is all about. Huge drain on innovation and an accelerant for corruption. We’ve grown so used to it now that we don’t even see it. Agree to terms, move on. Hear about some class-action lawsuit relevant to you, but never get anything from it. Nowadays we don’t even have a right to class-action in most agreements we sign with corporations. The same vultures in corporate law are making their way into public law. It’s like mixing bleach and ammonia.
It's the party of rules for thee, not for me.
Hypocrisy is a virtue:
> It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
> It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
> It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
> It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
> For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
* https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267
* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue
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Dead Comment
One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".
I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/sec-trump-cle...
Each of the above guys did the smart thing of buying influence (Milton retained the attorney general’s brother as his lawyer, for example). In the past you’d have to hide that better, but now it’s out in the open.
One of the guys mentioned in the article is now cleared to work on his new crypto venture. Of course.
Edit: not to “both sides” this, but it is interesting and mentioned in that NYT article that Biden pardoned a guy involved in a multi-billion dollar ponzi after serving 10 years (with 10 to go). Found an article from 2008 showing that the Bidens were linked with the firm. Not as direct of a quid pro quo but more the standard back scratching …
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/stanford-reportedly...
Deleted Comment
Australia taxes more, make no mistake, and the earning potential is less. Living in Australia though was the biggest improvement to quality life I've ever had. I've lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, SF, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney, and Sydney is #1 by such a large margin it shocked me.
My taxes went to funding public transportation that works. They funded government services like ServiceNSW that made me shocked how bad the DMV experiences were in the states. There's nationalized healthcare where I no longer had to worry if my friends could afford healthcare. The government has plenty of its own issues, but none of them felt as on the edge of the event horizon as US politics do.
I felt safe in Australia. With how things are again, I'm so glad I hold a passport with a kangaroo.
"It has also been reported that Trevor Milton gave $920,000 to Mr. Trump’s political campaign (or $1.8 million combined with his wife) and was represented in this case by Pam Bondi’s brother."