Trevor Milton seeks $1B funding for AI-powered aircraft venture after pardon

It has been nearly a year since Trevor Milton, the founder of the now-bankrupt electric truck company Nikola, received a pardon from President Trump. A recent Wall Street Journal report provides one of the first detailed looks at Milton’s latest venture, which focuses on developing autonomous aircraft.

Milton, along with an unnamed investment group, acquired a struggling aviation company, SyberJet Aircraft, toward the end of last year. Since then, he has been working to revitalise the business, a process that includes bringing in dozens of former Nikola employees, reaching out to potential investors in Saudi Arabia, and allocating several hundred thousand dollars toward lobbying efforts, according to the report.

His goal is to build a completely new avionics system from the ground up. This system is intended to support the development of what he describes as the first light jet designed specifically around artificial intelligence-driven flight capabilities. Such an innovation could potentially position the company to secure future defence-related contracts.

Milton, who was convicted of fraud in 2022, acknowledged the scale of the challenge involved in this new undertaking. He told the publication that developing aircraft would be significantly more difficult than his previous work, stating that he believes it will be “10 times harder than Nikola ever was.”