Who is the CIO of Nikola? Well, according to LinkedIn, there are two people: Morgan Mackelprang since 2015 and Isaac Sloan since 2019. Obviously they don't have two CIOs, and since Isaac is more recent and listed on the website, he is the real one. Read on...

#NikolaGate $NKLA

So apparently Morgan never updated his LinkedIn to reflect that he is not their CIO. But who is Morgan Mackelprang? In short, he is one of Trevor Milton's closest deputies. They go way back.

A decade ago, Trevor and Morgan were entering contests together for Doritos commercials. But they have been together for much longer, being long time friends.

Morgan was one of Trevor's first hires at dHybrid Inc. One of his first jobs was to try in the first attempt to make an electric truck. It didn't go well. He bought some salvage motors from a cancelled electric Ford Ranger, some batteries and an old truck chassis.

The motors were terribly suited for the job. They were designed to mate to the Ranger planetary gearbox so they had a weird helical output, plus there were no good options for an inverter. They eventually ended up in a shipping container at Nikola with other dHybrid scraps.

Morgan stayed with Trevor all through dHybrid and helped launder the stolen intellectual property when Trevor drove dHybrid Inc into the ground & restarted with dHybrid Systems. After the sale, he was a founding employee at Nikola in Jan. 2015. Of course Trevor gave him a C title

In 2017, Morgan made a Big Mistake. At the time the only thing Nikola had that could move itself was a UTV prototype built by Pratt & Miller. But it was buggy. One of the most serious bugs was that sometimes it would go full throttle without any input.

But some dignitaries from an important company were there and they needed something to show off, so Morgan took them to the UTV. Started it up, but it wouldn't run because the parking brake was set. He had to get out and go to the back to disengage the brake.

As soon as the suppression signal from the brake was removed, the UTV took off at full throttle without a driver, nearly running over some people. Morgan ran after it and got banged up in the process but wasn't able to stop it till it hit a wall.

To save face, Trevor told everyone that Morgan would be let go. Of course Morgan was never going to go anywhere But this probably did cost him his C level position. So what is his position now? Doesn't really matter, he's always been just Trevor's sidekick. Titles are irrelevant.

Post script: As Nikola worked towards trying to become seen as being a real company, they needed a real CIO to replace Morgan.

But instead, of course, Trevor just chose Isaac, his web designer from the failed http://uPillar.com  website.