Former billionaire Trevor Milton was sentenced Monday to four years behind bars for defrauding investors who invested in his Nikola electric truck company.
The prison sentence came more than a year after he was convicted of lying to investors that his prototype Nikola One truck was fully functional, even though in reality it could not be driven.
Trevor Milton first appeared on the Forbes list of billionaires in April 2020, when his fortune was estimated at $1.1 billion. Six years earlier, he founded the company Nikola, which was supposed to produce electric and hydrogen trucks. His wealth peaked at $8.7 billion in June 2020 after the company’s stock rose in value. Milton was not a multi-billionaire for long: the value of the company’s shares began to steadily decline, and he left the position of the company’s chairman in September 2020. By the end of 2021, he completely fell off the list of billionaires after being accused of misrepresenting the company’s technology. It was this accusation by one of the brokers that later led to a conviction.
Milton is not the only billionaire (or ex-billionaire) facing prison time. His prison sentence came just weeks after crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. He faces up to 110 years in prison.
Here are some other ultra-rich people who ended up behind bars.
Allen Stanford
74-year-old Allen Stanford is one of three former billionaires on this list who are still behind bars. He was convicted in 2012 of selling counterfeit certificates of deposit worth $7 billion through Stanford International Bank on the Caribbean island of Antigua. He was ordered to pay a fine of almost $6 billion, of which a certain amount was to go to his victims and their families. However, many of his clients reportedly never received the money. Stanford is responsible for one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. He was surpassed only by Bernie Madoff with his “heavy” 18 billion dollar scheme.
Madoff was never included in Forbes’ list of billionaires, and he died in prison in 2021.
Raj Rajaratnam
Rajaratnam was born in Sri Lanka, and made his fortune in New York after founding the Galleon Group hedge fund in the late 1990s. The fund at one point managed $7 billion in assets, but collapsed in 2009 after Rajaratnam was arrested for insider trading. He was later convicted on 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy, and in 2011 he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Rajaratnam was released to house arrest in 2019, in part with the help of Kim Kardashian lobbying for a law allowing non-violent offenders over the age of 60 to be released from prison earlier. Rajaratnam was released from house arrest in April 2021.
Jay Y. Lee
The current CEO of Samsung Electronics and heir to the Samsung empire, Jay Y. Lee spent 11 months in prison in 2017. A court in South Korea sentenced him to five years in prison for bribing then South Korean President Park Geun-hye to support the merger of Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries. His original five-year sentence was suspended, but that decision was later overturned and Lee returned to prison in January 2021. He served an additional seven months before being paroled in August 2021.
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