Nearly a year after receiving a presidential pardon, Trevor Milton is back with an ambitious and contentious new venture. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the founder of the defunct electric truck maker Nikola is now seeking to raise $1 billion to develop autonomous aircraft.

Milton's path back into the spotlight runs through SyberJet Aircraft, a small aviation firm he acquired with an investment group late last year. His strategy involves a significant overhaul, recruiting many former Nikola employees and engaging lobbyists. The Journal notes he has also courted potential investors from Saudi Arabia.

The core technical ambition is to engineer a completely new avionics system, aiming to produce what Milton calls the first light jet centered on artificial intelligence for flight. This focus suggests a future push for military contracts. Yet the scale of the challenge is not lost on him. Convicted of fraud in 2022, Milton admitted to the newspaper that building these AI-powered planes would be an order of magnitude more difficult than his previous endeavor with Nikola.

Source: TechCrunch