Beleaguered electrical trucking firm Nikola has bought the Badger electrical pickup truck belongings it was as soon as supposed to construct with Common Motors. The customer? A brand new firm known as Embr Motors created by car builder and tv character Dave “Heavy D” Sparks, one half of the previous TV duo the Diesel Brothers.
Embr now owns the mental property related to the Badger pickup truck, in addition to the belongings associated to Nikola’s deserted off-road and private water craft autos. It additionally owns the one two prototype variations of the Badger ever constructed.
Information of the deal to promote the Badger program comes at an odd time. Just some weeks in the past Nikola’s disgraced founder, Trevor Milton, introduced plans to attempt to set up Sparks and a slate of different administrators on the corporate’s board. That effort failed. Milton was sentenced to 4 years in jail in December after being convicted of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022, partially as a result of he misled buyers in regards to the progress of the Badger.
From its founding in 2014, Nikola was all the time primarily about making hydrogen and electrical huge rigs. But it surely revealed the Badger pickup in February 2020, only a few months earlier than it went public in a merger with a particular goal acquisition firm. In September 2020, Common Motors introduced it was investing $2 billion within the startup and that it could assist convey the Badger to market. Simply days later short-selling analysis agency Hindenburg Analysis printed a damning report alleging Nikola had made a lot of false claims. That report spiraled right into a authorities investigation, and in the end, led to Nikola paying a settlement to the SEC and Milton’s departure and eventual conviction. Nikola refunded the client deposits for the Badger and put this system on ice.
Diesel Brothers Dave “Heavy D” Sparks and Diesel Dave (Getty Pictures)
Sparks first revealed the acquisition earlier this week in a YouTube video titled “The Nikola Badger is REAL and I Own Them.” He mentioned the transaction concerned “tens of millions” of {dollars}.” He additionally defined how he was given inventory in Nikola as a part of an association to advertise the Badger (earlier than this system went underneath), and that he is a longtime buddy of Milton’s.
Nikola confirmed some particulars of the acquisition Thursday morning, when it revealed its monetary outcomes for 2023.
Britton Worthen, the corporate’s chief authorized officer, mentioned on a convention name that Sparks and his accomplice, Cole Cannon, “expressed a desire” to convey the Badger to market and introduced “several EV-related partners” to conferences as the 2 sides hammered out a deal. Nikola is actually loaning cash to Embr to buy the belongings and in alternate for a 30% stake within the firm, which may “retain some value for its shareholders” if something ever comes of the Badger or the opposite autos.
Worthen mentioned Nikola is clawing again 500,000 of these shares Milton gave Sparks as a part of the deal. Sparks and Cannon additionally agreed that Milton wouldn’t be concerned “directly or indirectly in any way” with these initiatives.
“Over the three and a half years since Mr. Milton left the company, we at Nikola have worked to stay above the fray, not comment on his legal proceedings, and stay focused on the work at hand to bring zero-emission class eight trucks to market,” Worthen mentioned on the decision. “The irony that Mr. Milton is now trying to take control of Nikola, after all that has happened in the past three and a half years is not lost on us at the company. We will continue to push back against any efforts he makes to attempt to take control of Nikola and we believe our directors and management are far and away better for our stockholders than a slate of directors who lack relevant experience to run a clean energy clean tech company.”
TechCrunch reached out to Cannon for touch upon his and Sparks’ involvement within the venture however didn’t instantly hear again.