Trump Sons Back Powerus Drone Roll-Up — But the Math Behind 10,000 Drones a Month Doesn’t Add Up

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are backing Powerus, a West Palm Beach drone roll-up formed just last year, through a reverse merger that will take the company public on Nasdaq under the ticker “PUSA,” expected to close in summer 2026. The transaction—reported this morning by The Wall Street Journal—merges Powerus with Aureus Greenway Holdings (AGH), a Trump-backed golf course company whose stock was already trading below $1 per share before today’s announcement. Shares surged as much as 55% on the news.

The key facts at a glance:

• The deal: Powerus merges with Aureus Greenway Holdings (AGH) via reverse merger to list on Nasdaq. The merger agreement was signed March 8, 2026, with an 8-K filed the following day. Existing Powerus shares convert to AGH stock at a 599.18229-to-1 ratio.
• The investors: American Ventures (the Trump family investment vehicle), Unusual Machines (drone components company where Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member and one of the investors in the $9 million private placement), Trump-affiliated Dominari Securities—where both Trump brothers hold roughly 6% stakes each—and the Korea Corporate Governance Improvement Fund ($50 million).
• The ambition: Powerus says it is targeting 10,000 drones per month to compete for the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance initiative, which aims to spend $1.1 billion on U.S.-made systems by 2027.
• The Ukrainian angle: Co-founder Brett Velicovich says the company is pursuing acquisitions or technology licenses from Ukrainian drone makers to white-label and build domestically.
• The source: The Wall Street Journal, reporting today, March 9, 2026.

The Structure Obscures the Conflict

Powerus is a drone company formed in 2025, backed by the president’s sons, seeking contracts from the president’s Pentagon, financed through a shell company the president’s family already owned shares in. The layers are worth naming plainly.

Unusual Machines—a Powerus investor and a company we’ve been tracking for conflict-of-interest concerns since October 2025—is itself a beneficiary of this same policy environment. Trump Jr. holds roughly 331,000 shares in Unusual Machines, valued at around $4 million. The company won its largest Pentagon contract to date last year, supplying the Army with 3,500 drone motors and components, with another 20,000 expected to follow. Unusual Machines CEO Allan Evans and spokespeople for Trump Jr. both denied he played any role in securing that deal.

Now Unusual Machines is investing in Powerus—a company that is also a customer of Unusual Machines. That loop closes tightly.

Eric Trump separately backed Israeli AI drone maker XTEND in a $1.5 billion reverse merger deal last month. That deal drew the same questions. The White House and Trump Organization deny wrongdoing and say all activity complies with applicable law. The president’s adult children are not subject to the same financial disclosure requirements as federal officials.

Powerus Claims 10,000 Drones a Month. That Number Needs Context.

CEO Andrew Fox—who spent close to three decades running a building services company in New York and told the WSJ he has no prior drone experience—says Powerus is targeting more than 10,000 drones per month once it secures public capital. That figure would exceed the output of almost every other U.S. drone manufacturer. The entire U.S. industry currently produces an estimated 100,000 drones per year, or roughly 8,300 per month across all manufacturers combined.

The company has acquired three small firms in the past six months and sells aerial and maritime drones, including heavy-lift systems with payload capacity up to 675 kg (approximately 1,488 lbs). A $9 million private placement is attached to the merger to fund initial manufacturing expansion—a modest sum for the scale being claimed.

Co-founder Brett Velicovich brings real credentials. He is a former U.S. Army special operations intelligence analyst, Delta Force veteran, and longtime drone adviser to both U.S. and Ukrainian military entities. He has been involved in funneling drone technology to Ukrainian forces since the early stages of the Russian invasion in 2022. A U.S.-Ukraine drone technology transfer arrangement has been under discussion at the government level for over a year, and Velicovich’s personal relationships in Kyiv give Powerus a plausible path to the Ukrainian technology it says it wants to license.

That transfer faces a structural problem, though. Ukrainian drone makers export with difficulty. The U.S. military has firm “Made in America” requirements that complicate direct offshore procurement. Velicovich acknowledged as much to the WSJ: “There does need to be an American face in front of it or behind it.”

That framing is exactly the logic behind every U.S. defense roll-up that sources foreign technology and re-badges it as domestic. It is legal. It can be effective. And when the company doing it is backed by the president’s family, the procurement selection process becomes very hard to evaluate from the outside.

The Pentagon’s Drone Push Created This Opening

None of this happens without the policy environment the Trump administration built. The June 2025 “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” executive order directed the FAA to expand BVLOS operations and pushed federal agencies to prioritize U.S.-made systems. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 memo reclassified small drones as “consumable” supplies, letting field commanders buy directly without lengthy approval processes. The One Big Beautiful Bill earmarked $1.4 billion for the small UAS industrial base.

The Drone Dominance initiative—$1.1 billion targeting hundreds of thousands of U.S. systems by 2027—is the contract pipeline Powerus is explicitly chasing. The U.S. drone market remains highly fragmented, full of small companies with little revenue competing for a small slice of defense spending. Consolidation is rational. Reverse mergers to access public capital are a proven playbook. The problem isn’t the strategy. It’s who is executing it.

Financial Times analysis found that at least four portfolio companies of 1789 Capital—the VC firm where Trump Jr. is a partner—won contracts from the Trump administration this year totaling more than $735 million. That includes a $620 million Pentagon loan to Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet startup with roughly 30 employees at the time of the award. The pattern is consistent.

DroneXL’s Take

We’ve been tracking this story since Trump Jr. joined Unusual Machines in November 2024. The Powerus announcement today is the same playbook, bigger stage.

What’s different this time is scale. Powerus isn’t positioning as a components supplier. It’s positioning as a full-stack drone manufacturer targeting 10,000 units a month—a claim so large it deserves serious skepticism from anyone who has watched the U.S. drone manufacturing sector try to scale. The industry’s honest output is nowhere near that number, and a $9 million private placement doesn’t build the factories needed to get there.

Velicovich is the real asset here. His Ukraine connections are genuine, his combat experience is real, and the technology pipeline he’s describing—licensing Ukrainian battlefield-proven designs and building them in the U.S.—is exactly what the Pentagon says it wants. That said, this week’s Fox News segment, where Velicovich commentated over Ukrainian drone footage while describing it as American technology, is a reminder that the gap between his media persona and operational ground truth deserves scrutiny too.

The question isn’t whether the tech is real. The question is whether Powerus wins Pentagon contracts because its drones outperform competitors, or because the president’s sons are investors. That distinction matters enormously for how this market develops. If proximity to the White House becomes a reliable path to defense contracts, capable companies without political connections stop competing—and the U.S. ends up with expensive, connected suppliers instead of good ones.

Expect Powerus to announce its first Pentagon contract within 12 months of listing on Nasdaq. If and when it does, the conflict-of-interest questions will be louder than they are today.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.