By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell book
BBC - Honduras - CIA Trial book - NY Mag
LITERARY COURTHOUSE, Sept 12 – Foley Square which Trevor Milton walked through on Monday after his jury selection without answering the Press question about the dismissal of a juror with a Tesla connection had been a stage for Elon Musk.
Back in April 2019, before the world ever heard of COVID, Musk after a two hours argument about his Tweets before Judge Alison Nathan had left the courthouse in a flurry, directly into a white Tesla, driving grandly north on Centre Street toward Canal and Grand.
The Tesla had not had a license plate, it had seemed to Kurt Wheelock who had covered the SEC v. Musk argument up in Judge Nathan's ninth floor courtroom, then come down to Foley Square to film. How was that possible? Inner City Press story here.
A few months later in 2019 a defendant being sentenced by Judge Nathan for fentanyl had told her he'd been inspired by a book by Elon Musk. Kurt, again in the courtroom, had wondered: was the man being ironic? The man got 102 months or eight and a half years.
Now Trevor Milton, on the highest charge against him, faced 25 years. Maybe that's why unlike Elon he didn't answer questions. Or maybe it was more. Much of the case against Milton was based on puffery in his answers.
Now that Kurt Wheelock was covering the actual US v. Milton trial, since no plea offer had been made or asked for, he was going back to listen to some of the podcasters who had turned on Trevor.
Before the fall they had built him up, lobbing softball questions about hydrogen and a factory in Germany. Then they went back and claimed they had simply been "letting Trevor run," giving him enough rope to hang himself.
Some said they hoped to be quoted in the trial, their puff interviews converted into evidence in a sort of social media reverse alchemy.
One had asked Trevor Milton why he had named the company Nikola, wasn't it just an attempt to link himself to Elon by taking the first name of investor Nikola Tesla?
"That would be a real d*ck move," Milton had answered, then fumbled to find another explanation.
Nikola Tesla spent his later years moving from hotel to hotel in Manhattan, never paying his bills. He died in the hotel New Yorker. But he was never prosecuted.
Kurt Wheelock was still trying to keep up with the other cases he covered, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, on the Eastern Front, at the UN he was still banned from with UNGA Week coming up, in DDC and even the Twitter versus Musk case down in Delaware.
But for the next weeks he'd been headed first each day to Courtroom 318, or the overflow courtroom up on the fifth floor.
318, he'd learned since coming to cover SDNY after being thrown out of the UN for his reporting, had once been the arraignments court, the deal making court, the white hot center of it all. Maybe there had been Mafia trials there, or the Rosenbergs.
The Mother Court, they called it. Milton's mother had died of cancer, he'd brought that up in podcasts. That, the prosecutors wouldn't use. The newly selected jurors would have sympathy for that. Massive ranch in Utah not so much. More on Patreon here.
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