Trump's Sons Backing Company Targeting Pentagon's Drone Contracts Amid Chinese Ban: Report

Last Updated:March 09, 2026, 22:35 IST

Powerus, a drone company based in Florida's West Palm Beach, is merging with a publicly traded golf-course holding company backed by the Trump family.

US President Donald Trump’s two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, are backing a new drone company that seeks military contracts from the Pentagon to fill the administration’s ban on new Chinese drones, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Powerus, a drone company based in Florida’s West Palm Beach, is merging with a publicly traded golf-course holding company backed by the Trump family, according to the company’s executives. Investors in the deal include Trump’s investment company, American Ventures, and a drone components company called Unusual Machines, in which Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member, as per the report.

Dominari Securities, an investment bank supported by the Trump brothers and linked to the family’s crypto dealings, is also involved in the transaction. The Korea Corporate Governance Improvement Fund has also invested $50 million in the deal.

The deal marks the deeper involvement of the Trump family in the multi-billion-dollar drone sector after changes implemented by the Trump administration, including the Pentagon’s emphasis on large-scale adoption of small drones, and a national ban on new models of Chinese drones that have long dominated commercial markets.

What Does This Deal Bring?

The administration has launched new initiatives, such as the Pentagon’s new Drone Dominance, to spend $1.1 billion to procure hundreds of thousands of US drones by 2027 in order to reduce dependence on Chinese imports. The US drone market is usually highly fragmented, with small companies that are mostly competing for a sliver of defence purchases and have little revenue.

Powerus, which sells aerial and maritime drones after acquiring three small companies in the past six months, said it was working towards building over 10,000 drones each month to satisfy the Pentagon’s demands. This quantity is more than almost any US manufacturer and also much more than the Department of Defence has historically bought, according to the WSJ report.

Powerus CEO Andrew Fox said the reverse merger would provide the company with access to public capital markets to give the company the funding it needs to scale manufacturing and acquire more companies in its ambitious drone production goal. Meanwhile, Eric Trump is also investing in an Israeli drone maker, Xtend, as part of a $1.5 billion deal to take the company public through a merger with JFB Construction.

Powerus is expected to become public after merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a holding company for golf courses in Florida, whose shareholders include the Trumps’ American Ventures and Dominari Securities. Fox said the company has drones designed for putting out wildfires and carrying up to 1,000 pounds.

Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich, a US Army special operations veteran who has advised drone companies in the US and Ukraine, said Powerus is working on deals to acquire Ukrainian drone companies or license their technology and build and white-label it in the US.

News world Trump's Sons Backing Company Targeting Pentagon's Drone Contracts Amid Chinese Ban: Report

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