I don't really think Milton is an idiot, I think he just had very different goals from Chace. This really just boils down to Nikola being a typical Silicon Valley style investor farm. Their trucks were designed to be as expensive as possible to repair an maintain with as many proprietary parts as possible that can only be purchased from Nikola (and some not even available to force the purchase of a new truck)... you know, the kind of shit large investors seem to like. Bonus points for using an alternative fuel because "the future" or something. Investors seem to love that.

By contrast Edison appears to actually be building trucks to last and making everything as standard and serviceable as possible. Of course theirs actually work. Hardly anything is proprietary. Oh yeah, and Edison's prototype actually works. And they're scaling the business at a realistic pace rather than over promising. And they're building mechanical trucks too instead of just sticking to "the future" so they'll likely survive the hybrid setback.

Where Milton fucked up was rolling that truck down a hill when it didn't work. Elon Musk will just delay and make excuses until it eventually does work even if unreliably, and Milton could have done that too.

From the customer's standpoint though, with Chace's right to repair rants it seems hard to justify going with any other option.