Almost a year after Trevor Milton, the founder of the now-bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola, was pardoned by President Trump, the Wall Street Journal has explored Milton’s latest venture: developing autonomous planes.
Milton and an “investment group” acquired a struggling aviation company named SyberJet Aircraft late last year and have been working on its revival. This involves recruiting “dozens” of former Nikola employees, seeking potential investors from Saudi Arabia, and spending several hundred thousand dollars on lobbying, according to the report.
Milton aims to design a completely new avionics system to develop the “first light jet to focus on artificial-intelligence flight,” which might lead to defense contracts. However, Milton, who was convicted of fraud in 2022, mentioned to the newspaper that he believes planes will be “10 times harder than Nikola ever was.”