The Securities and Exchange Commission closed its investigation into bankrupt electric vehicle startup Fisker last September, roughly one year after the probe was opened.
TechCrunch learned the investigation was closed when the financial regulator responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in January. The SEC’s FOIA department said it had identified “approximately 21.7 gigabytes of electronically maintained records” related to the investigation. The agency doesn’t typically make records available if investigations are still open, and it explained in a follow-up email that it “was closed in September 2025.”
It’s not clear how far the investigation progressed. The SEC revealed the existence of the probe in an October 2024 filing in Fisker’s bankruptcy case. The agency wrote at the time that it had sent subpoenas to the company and that it may need to “request or subpoena additional documents in the future relating to its ongoing investigation.”
A spokesperson for the agency declined to comment. Founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The closure of the Fisker investigation comes amid a significant drop in enforcement actions and settlements during President Trump’s second term. The SEC initiated 313 enforcement actions in 2025 — the lowest in a decade and down 27% from the the final year of President Biden’s term, according to an analysis by law firm Paul, Weiss. Only four of those enforcement actions were against public companies. Total monetary settlements fell 45% from 2024.
Fisker was one of the last remaining electric vehicle startups under investigation by the SEC. Over the last few years, the agency settled fraud or other charges brought against Nikola, Lordstown Motors, Canoo, Hyzon Motors, and others. In 2023, it closed an investigation into Lucid Motors without a lawsuit.
The only known active investigation remaining into an electric vehicle startup is the one related to Faraday Future, which is now nearly four years old. In July 2025, the SEC sent Faraday and multiple executives “Wells notices,” or letters that inform a subject that the investigators recommend an enforcement action. No action has been taken since those letters were sent, though, and Faraday’s own regulatory filings indicate it has not yet responded to the Wells notices.
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Fisker filed for bankruptcy in June 2024 amid a raft of problems with its first EV, the Ocean SUV. The company spent years making bold promises about developing radical new technologies, but pivoted from those ideas multiple times. It also had major financial trouble in the run-up to its collapse. It used the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process to sell off its remaining inventory of Oceans to a company that leases vehicles to ride-hail drivers and liquidate its other assets.
