Who Owns DJI? Frank Wang's Cap Table and the Pentagon's Blacklist

The short answer: DJI is a private company controlled by the people who started it. Founder Frank Wang and three early investors hold 99% of the voting rights and roughly 87.4% of the shares, a breakdown DJI disclosed in its own October 2024 lawsuit against the Pentagon. State-linked Chinese funds sit in the smallest shareholder group, at 5.4% of shares and 0.6% of votes. The drones are built in DJI’s own factories in Shenzhen, with additional production in Malaysia. None of that has stopped the US Department of Defense from listing DJI as a “Chinese military company,” a label DJI is still fighting in federal court as of this writing. If you are shopping the current lineup, our best DJI drone guide covers what is still available in the US; the links on this page are affiliate links that support DroneXL at no extra cost to you.

This page pulls together what DroneXL has reported on DJI since 2020, from our profile of Frank Wang’s rise from a dorm room to a drone empire to the Pentagon lawsuit we have tracked through a district court loss, an appeal, and a partial reversal. Where a figure comes from outside DroneXL, the source is named inline.

Who owns DJI?

Four people own DJI in every sense that matters. Frank Wang, Henry Lu, Swift Xie, and Li Zexiang together hold 99% of the company’s voting rights and approximately 87.4% of its shares, per the complaint DJI filed against the US Department of Defense on October 18, 2024. That filing is the only detailed shareholder disclosure DJI has ever made.

The complaint, as reported by TechCrunch and quoted in filings that circulated after DJI sued the Pentagon over its military designation, breaks the cap table into three groups:

DJI added that the founders’ shares and voting rights have only increased since at least 2020. A later court filing DroneXL covered in March 2025 put the founder group at over 88% of stock and 99.3% of voting rights, with state-owned entities at 4.3% of shares and 0.5% of votes, so the exact percentages move a little between documents. The shape does not: the founders hold nearly all the votes, and outside money, state-linked or not, holds almost none.

Wang’s personal stake has been reported at roughly 45% since Forbes profiled him in 2015, but DJI’s court filings give only the combined founder-group figure, and because the company has never gone public there is no audited number.

The three early investors are not passive names. Li Zexiang is the robotics professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who mentored Wang’s early flight-control experiments and later brought funding and people into the company. Henry Lu, listed by Forbes under his Chinese name Lu Di as a DJI shareholder, is the early backer who came in as a family friend. Swift Xie, a childhood friend Wang brought in to run marketing, completed the group; the Amarre documentary DroneXL transcribed says Xie sold his apartment to buy a 14% stake weeks after joining, a bet that later made him a billionaire.

Who is Frank Wang?

Wang Tao, known internationally as Frank Wang, founded DJI in 2006 out of his dorm room at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and moved the company to Shenzhen soon after. Born in 1980, he is DJI’s chairman, and Forbes has called him the world’s first drone billionaire.

Frank Wang, the founder and chairman who still holds the votes at DJI. Photo credit: DJI

The founding story DroneXL told in our 2025 profile starts with a teenager who crashed a remote-controlled helicopter and waited months for parts, then built the flight controller he wished he had. DJI’s first products were flight-control systems for hobbyist helicopters, not drones. The company nearly ran out of a team in its first two years before Li Zexiang stepped in.

Two dates changed the company’s size. In January 2013 DJI shipped the Phantom, the first ready-to-fly quadcopter a buyer could unbox and have in the air within an hour, which Forbes credited with unlocking the market beyond obsessed hobbyists. In September 2016 the foldable Mavic Pro did the same thing again for a drone that fit in a jacket pocket. By 2015, the year the Phantom 3 launched, DJI was the largest consumer drone company in the world, and Forbes put Wang on its billionaires list that August.

A Phantom 2 Vision+ over Weissfluhjoch, Switzerland, in February 2015, its three-axis gimbal camera slung beneath the white airframe: the generation that put a stabilized camera on the ready-to-fly Phantom. Photo credit: Capricorn4049, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

Wang also ran into an early partnership that ended badly. He and Colin Guinn set up DJI North America in 2011; the pair fell out over credit for the Phantom and over Guinn calling himself CEO of DJI Innovations, and the dispute was settled out of court in 2013.

The original Mavic Pro of September 2016, arms unfolded and gimbal camera forward. Folding the airframe into a jacket pocket is the trick every DJI consumer drone since has copied. Photo credit: DJI

Forbes put Wang’s real-time net worth at $5.1 billion on August 29, 2026, ranking him 835th in the world at age 45; the figure moves daily. He keeps a low public profile and has not given a Western interview in years, which is one reason DJI’s ownership is so often guessed at.

Do Chinese state funds own part of DJI?

Yes, a small piece. DJI’s 2024 complaint acknowledged that two state-owned investment funds, the Shanghai Free Trade Zone Equity Fund and the Chengtong Fund, had made minority investments, and placed the whole smallest shareholder group at 5.4% of shares and 0.6% of voting rights. The Pentagon’s June 2026 relisting adds an asserted indirect affiliation with SASAC, the commission that oversees China’s state-owned enterprises, without publishing evidence for it.

The Pentagon leaned on those stakes to argue DJI was indirectly owned by the Chinese Communist Party through Chengtong, which sits under China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. The court did not buy it. When US District Judge Paul Friedman ruled against DJI on September 26, 2025, he found the Defense Department’s evidence of Chinese Communist Party ownership insufficient, and he noted the Pentagon had confused two industrial development zones. He upheld the listing anyway, on two other grounds covered below.

That is the counter-intuitive part of the DJI ownership story. The government’s ownership theory lost in court, and DJI’s own disclosure was what put the state-linked stakes on the record in the first place. A company that had spent years saying only “DJI is privately held” ended up publishing its cap table because it wanted off a blacklist.

Where are DJI drones made?

DJI builds its drones itself, in company-owned factories in Shenzhen, rather than farming assembly out to contractors the way most consumer electronics brands do. The company also runs production in Malaysia. Its headquarters, the twin-tower DJI Sky City, sits in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district; Wang called the building “a product unlike any we’ve ever made: our real home” when DJI opened it in September 2022.

Shenzhen is the reason DJI could exist as a startup. The city holds the densest electronics supply chain on earth, which let a company with a handful of engineers prototype quickly and cheaply in 2006. Owning the factories is a later choice, and it is one of the reasons DJI iterates hardware faster than rivals who wait on a contract manufacturer’s schedule.

A DJI flagship store in Shenzhen in June 2018, its windows lined with Tello, Spark, and Mavic Air displays. DJI sells direct through its own retail in China, a step most consumer electronics brands never take. Photo credit: Raysonho, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Country of origin for the parts inside is murkier. A 2020 Nikkei teardown of the Mavic Air 2 found the drone was built largely from standard off-the-shelf components rather than custom silicon; most came from China, but the radio-signal amplifiers were from Qorvo, an American chipmaker. The Commerce Department’s 2020 Entity List action restricted DJI’s access to US parts, and DJI has been diversifying its supply chain since.

Malaysia matters more now than it did. Since the FCC placed foreign-made drones on its Covered List on December 22, 2025, and since a Section 232 proclamation signed August 13, 2026 put 100% tariffs on thermal-equipped aircraft, docks, and drones over 55 pounds (25 kilograms), with 25% on nearly everything else, where a drone is assembled and who is named on its FCC filing have become the whole game. DroneXL has documented a network of suspected DJI shell companies filing DJI-derived hardware under other names, and the FCC has since moved against rebrands too.

DJI Sky City, the 44- and 40-story Foster + Partners towers DJI opened in September 2022 after six years of construction, joined by a 90-meter suspension bridge 105 meters up. Photo credit: DJI

How big is DJI?

DJI is the dominant civilian drone maker on the planet. Forbes puts its share of the global consumer market at more than two-thirds, and an FAA study of Remote ID detections reported in March 2026 put DJI at 96% of US airspace. An industry survey reported on August 28, 2026 still had DJI at 97%.

The same FAA data explains why the ban debate is so heated: 93.7% of the top detected platforms weighed three pounds or less, and 92.6% of flights stayed within half a nautical mile of the pilot. The fleet Washington is restricting is overwhelmingly small aircraft flying close to their operators.

A Mavic Pro hovers low over the shoreline at sunset, green status light on, a paddleboarder drifting past behind it. This is what 96% of US airspace looks like in practice: a small drone, a few hundred feet from the person flying it. Photo credit: DroneXL

DJI is also no longer only a drone company. It has owned a majority of the Swedish camera maker Hasselblad, sells the Osmo action and pocket cameras, Ronin gimbals, DJI Mic audio gear, Agras agricultural sprayers, the Dock line police departments run for drone-as-first-responder programs, and portable power stations, with a balcony solar system teased for IFA 2026. DJI does not publish audited financials, so every revenue figure you see for it is an estimate.

Why does the US call DJI a Chinese military company?

Because the Defense Department put DJI on its Section 1260H list of “Chinese military companies” in October 2022, and two federal courts have so far let the listing stand. The label does not ban anything by itself, but it warns US entities off doing business with DJI and feeds the FCC and congressional actions that followed.

DJI sued on October 18, 2024, after what it described as sixteen months of trying to get the Pentagon to explain itself. Judge Friedman’s 49-page opinion of September 26, 2025 rejected the ownership theory, as noted above, but upheld two findings: that DJI holds National Enterprise Technology Center status, a Chinese designation that carries tax breaks and subsidies and that the court acknowledged is widely granted to innovative companies including foreign ones, and that DJI’s technology has “both substantial theoretical and actual military application” regardless of the company’s own policies against military use. DJI appealed in October 2025. The NETC status dates from 2021 and comes with tax breaks, cash subsidies, and support from state-owned capital funds, which is the one government finding that has survived every round so far.

A Ukrainian State Border Guard operator with a DJI Mavic in February 2024. Battlefield use like this, which DJI prohibits and cannot prevent, is what the court meant by "actual military application." Photo credit: ArmyInform, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

On August 14, 2026 the D.C. Circuit handed DJI a partial reversal. The three-judge panel rejected DJI’s due process, evidence, and unequal-treatment arguments but agreed that the district court had upheld the Pentagon’s “defense industrial base” finding without examining the classified record behind it, and sent the case back to Judge Friedman. DJI stays on the list while that review happens, and the Pentagon had already published a fresh Section 1260H list on June 10, 2026 that keeps DJI on it with new justifications, two of which Friedman had rejected the previous September. DJI called the ruling a step toward correcting what it maintains is an unjustified designation.

Separately, a 2026 US security audit by OnDefend of the Air 3S and Matrice 4E reported no backdoors and no unauthorized foreign data transmission. The federal audit that was supposed to settle the question under the 2025 NDAA never happened, and the default consequence, Covered List placement, followed on schedule.

What is DJI’s status in the US as of this writing?

Owning and flying a DJI drone is legal, and firmware and security updates for already-authorized aircraft are protected until at least January 1, 2029 under FCC Public Notice DA 26-454. What has closed is the door for new models, and a second FCC action may close it for some existing ones.

The first action was the Covered List placement of December 22, 2025, which blocks new equipment authorizations, importation, and marketing of foreign-made drones. DJI responded by launching hardware Americans cannot buy, including the Lito X1 and the Osmo Pocket 4P, and by setting a September 3, 2026 launch for the Osmo 360 II with no US price announced.

The second is Public Notice DA 26-758, which the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau opened on July 21, 2026 and published in the Federal Register on August 3. It proposes stripping import and marketing clearance from already-approved foreign drones that fall into seven “military-grade” categories: aircraft of 55 pounds (25 kilograms) or more, aerosol dispensers, thermal imaging, LiDAR sensing, docking stations, aircraft built to carry a defense article, and swarming systems. The LiDAR category is the one that reaches consumers, because it sweeps in the Mini 5 Pro, Air 3S, Avata 360, Neo 2, and Mavic 4 Pro. Thermal covers the Mavic 3T and Matrice 30T, 4T, and 4TD; docking covers the DJI Dock, Dock 2, and Dock 3; the weight and spray rules cover Agras and FlyCart. Models with none of those features, such as the Mini 4 Pro or the non-S Air 3, would stay sellable. The FCC has not published a model list; that sort is DroneXL’s reading of the seven categories against each drone’s published specs.

The Mavic 4 Pro, DJI's current flagship, head-on with its three-lens Hasselblad gimbal. The forward LiDAR sensor below the camera is what puts it inside the FCC's proposed "military-grade" category. Photo credit: Billy Kyle

Comments close September 2, 2026, after DJI pointed its own customers at the docket on August 7 and directed them to the Drone Advocacy Alliance’s filing guide; DroneXL is a DAA partner. If adopted as written, the sales restriction would take effect roughly 180 days after final publication. Existing owners keep flying, and private resale stays legal. On top of that, the Section 232 tariffs take effect September 3, 2026. For anyone buying for an agency or a contract, our guide to what NDAA compliance actually requires covers which statute binds whom, and our DJI deals page tracks where prices actually sit.

DJI timeline

The Phantom line, seen here in its final Phantom 4 form, is the product that took DJI from flight controllers to the world's largest drone maker. DJI retired the last Phantom in April 2025. Photo credit: DroneXL

For the century of drone history that DJI’s twenty years sit inside, see our history of drones guide. Every DJI story DroneXL publishes lands on the DJI hub; corporate and leadership coverage collects under DJI Company. This page is maintained by Haye Kesteloo and updated in place as the court cases and the FCC docket move.