Pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton is trying to raise $1B for AI-powered planes

It’s been astir precisely 1 twelvemonth since Trevor Milton, the laminitis of now-bankrupt electrical motortruck startup Nikola, was pardoned by President Trump. Now, the Wall Street Journal has published 1 of the archetypal heavy dives into Milton’s caller effort: trying to physique autonomous planes.

Milton and an “investment group” purchased a downtrodden aviation institution called SyberJet Aircraft precocious past year, and has spent the clip since trying to crook the institution around. That involves bringing successful “dozens” of erstwhile Nikola staff, soliciting imaginable investors from Saudi Arabia, and spending a fewer 100 1000 dollars connected lobbying, according to the report.

He reportedly wants to plan an wholly caller avionics strategy from the crushed up that volition assistance the institution make the “first airy pitchy to absorption connected artificial-intelligence flight,” which could unfastened up the doorway for defence contracts. But Milton, who was convicted of fraud successful 2022, told the paper that beryllium thinks planes volition beryllium “10 times harder than Nikola ever was.”