Donald Trump’s sons could be in for a payday over their father’s planned $1 billion-plus military equipment purchases.
Donald Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in a new drone company targeting Pentagon contracts, with plans to go public on the Nasdaq, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration has made domestic drone supply a national security priority, banning new models of Chinese drones—which had long dominated the consumer and commercial markets—and launching the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance initiative.
The program is earmarked to spend $1.1 billion procuring hundreds of thousands of American-made systems by 2027. That has opened a major commercial window in a sector that has historically been fragmented and starved of defense contracts.
Into that gap has stepped Powerus, a West Palm Beach, Florida-based company formed last year that has since bought three smaller drone firms and is targeting monthly production of more than 10,000 units.
The company will go public through a reverse merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Florida golf-course holding firm, allowing it to trade on the Nasdaq, according to the Journal.
The outlet reports that Don Jr., 48, and Eric, 42, are invested through American Ventures, one of the family’s investment vehicles. Aureus shareholders already include American Ventures and Dominari Securities—the Trump-backed investment bank that has helped facilitate the family’s cryptocurrency deals.
Unusual Machines, a maker of drone components where Donald Jr. holds shares and sits on the advisory board, is also an investor in Powerus—and Powerus is already one of its customers.
Powerus CEO Andrew Fox told the Journal that the appeal was straightforward: “The drone market is certainly going to grow faster than, say, golf courses are.”
Fox, who spent nearly three decades running a facilities management company in New York and has no background in the drone industry, said the public listing would give Powerus access to capital markets to fund further acquisitions and scale up manufacturing. South Korean asset manager, the Korea Corporate Governance Improvement Fund, has separately committed $50 million to the deal.
Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich, a military veteran who served in U.S. Army special operations and has advised drone firms in both the U.S. and Ukraine before becoming a familiar face on cable news, said the company is in talks to acquire Ukrainian drone makers or license their technology for American production. That approach addresses the Pentagon’s preference for domestically made weapons. “There does need to be an American face in front of it or behind it,” he told the Journal.
Fox added that Powerus has built drones capable of fighting wildfires and hauling loads of up to 1,000 pounds.
The arrangement puts the Trump family in a position to profit from policies the Trump administration has engineered—the ban on new Chinese drone models and the Pentagon spending push—while holding financial stakes in companies positioned to fill the market gap those policies created.
The deal would be the latest business venture for two men who have already grown substantially wealthier since their father returned to the White House.
Forbes put Donald Jr.’s net worth at around $50 million just before January 2025’s inauguration, and by the end of the year, that figure had grown sixfold, per Forbes. That was driven by crypto ventures and his role at a venture capital firm whose portfolio companies received at least four federal contracts from the Trump administration, according to the Financial Times.
Eric’s financial rise has been even greater. Forbes valued him at around $40 million before his father’s return to power, but the Nasdaq debut of his cryptocurrency mining company, American Bitcoin, briefly pushed his personal stake to nearly $950 million before the stock cooled sharply. Forbes now puts his net worth at around $400 million—a roughly tenfold increase.
The Daily Beast reached out to the Trump Organization and Powerus for comment.
Powerus founder Brett Velicovich told the Beast: “Bringing Powerus to this point has been years in the making. I’ve been a huge advocate for our ability to deliver tools to the warfighter that match and exceed the challenges of the new battlefield. This event today is a huge step forward in realizing that vision, and we’re excited to execute on our plan for American drone dominance.”
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