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It\u2019s been almost exactly one year since Trevor Milton, the founder of now-bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola, was pardoned<\/a> by President Trump. Now, the Wall Street Journal has published one of the first deep dives into Milton\u2019s new effort<\/a>: trying to build autonomous planes.<\/p>\n Milton and an \u201cinvestment group\u201d purchased a downtrodden aviation company called SyberJet Aircraft late last year, and has spent the time since trying to turn the company around. That involves bringing in \u201cdozens\u201d of former Nikola staff, soliciting possible investors from Saudi Arabia, and spending a few hundred thousand dollars on lobbying, according to the report.<\/p>\n He reportedly wants to design an entirely new avionics system from the ground up that will help the company create the \u201cfirst light jet to focus on artificial-intelligence flight,\u201d which could open up the door for defense contracts. But Milton, who was convicted of fraud in 2022<\/a>, told the newspaper that be thinks planes will be \u201c10 times harder than Nikola ever was.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n