Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Targeting Pentagon Sales
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, are backing a new drone company that is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon and fill a hole left by the administration’s ban on new Chinese drones in the U.S.
Powerus, a drone roll-up company based in West Palm Beach, Fla., is merging with a publicly traded golf-course holding company backed by the Trumps, Powerus executives said. The reverse merger will result in Powerus, which was formed last year, trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming months.
Investors in the deal include one of the Trumps’ investment vehicles, American Ventures, and Unusual Machines UMAC 5.02% increase; green up pointing triangle , a drone components company where Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member, the company said. Powerus is also a customer of Unusual Machines.
The Trump brothers-backed investment bank Dominari Securities DOMH 7.21% increase; green up pointing triangle , which has been involved in the family’s crypto deals , is also involved in the transaction, the company said. Separately, asset manager the Korea Corporate Governance Improvement Fund has invested $50 million.
The deal brings deeper involvement by the Trump family into a multibillion-dollar sector that has new opportunities for growth following changes imposed by the Trump administration. Those include the Pentagon’s emphasis on large-scale, rapid adoption of small drones, and a national ban on new models of the Chinese drones that have for more than a decade dominated the consumer and commercial markets.
Powerus Chief Executive Officer Andrew Fox said the reverse merger for Powerus would provide access to the public capital markets to give the company the funding it needs to scale manufacturing and acquire more companies. Powerus, which sells aerial and maritime drones after acquiring three small companies in the past six months, said it was working toward building more than 10,000 drones each month. That quantity is more than almost any other U.S. drone manufacturer produces and far more than the Defense Department has historically bought.
New initiatives such as the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance , an initiative to spend $1.1 billion to procure hundreds of thousands of U.S. systems by 2027, aim to encourage more domestic manufacturing in a sector China has long dominated. The U.S. drone market is highly fragmented with small companies that are mostly competing for a sliver of defense purchases and have little revenue.
Eric Trump is also investing in Israeli drone maker Xtend as part of a $1.5 billion deal to take the company public through a merger with JFB Construction .
Powerus will become public after merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings AGH 13.24% increase; green up pointing triangle , a holding company for golf courses in Florida, whose shareholders include the Trumps’ American Ventures and Dominari Securities, according to securities filings. Aureus’s stock recently recovered from trading below $1 per share.
The drone market “is certainly going to grow faster than, say, golf courses are,” Fox said.
Fox, an entrepreneur who spent close to three decades managing a building services company in New York and said he has no prior drone experience, added that Powerus has drones designed for putting out wildfires and carrying up to 1,000 pounds.
Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich, a U.S. Army special operations veteran who has advised drone companies in the U.S. and Ukraine and is a regular commenter on cable news shows, said Powerus is working on deals to acquire Ukrainian drone companies or license their technology and build and white-label it in the U.S. He declined to share details.
Ukrainian drone manufacturers face numerous hurdles in exporting their drones, and the U.S. military, while it is pursuing technology from Ukraine, has requirements for American-made weapons that make direct purchases from overseas tricky.
“There does need to be an American face in front of it or behind it,” Velicovich said.
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Eat yer heart out Hunter, this is how real grifters do it ... on the back nine.
lucky for the american taxpayer there's a competitive bidding process the trump administration strictly adheres to ... /s
If they break any laws Obviously the Trump Justice Dept won't do anything about that.
But other large "traditional" defense companies would probably inititate lawsuits.
Not to mention quality control....
A crazed comparison but …… even if the laptop is legit ….. you must acquit
It's about time for Uday and Qusay to move on from their mundane, everyday scams and get into something really lucrative, like war profiteering.
hopefully they share the same prosperous futures ...
Trump just spoke about the war for about half an hour. Honest to god he sounds like a moron.
What have the American people ever done to deserve this?
What war? It's "an excursion"!
I learned two things from him.
The US will take over the straight of Hormuz.
The war will end very soon.
There is something wrong with him. He is mentally ill like no one has ever seen before. In other words, (very) strongly.
I learned a third, the gulibility of his fans never wanes.
He's gone a long way for somebody who is so "mentally ill"
Learn this: The war ends when Trump says its over.
A distance that wouldn't have been possible without mentally ill and just plain brain-dead supporters.
Just because someone fooled a moron does not make them a genius, it just makes them a hair smarter than the moron.
There appears to be a neverending supply of squirrels scamperring about the WH lawn for him to toss and he loves his whack-em war toys. Enjoy his spreading neo-hegemony, Lady Lindsey is.
you mean when putin tells trump it's over. trumpski called putin to find out why his bestie is sending iran the targeting information that killed 7 american soldiers. now trump is pushing to have sanctions against russia to be eased or removed so his bestie putin can capitalize on the higher oil prices to continue his war on ukraine, while trump slows or disables arms shipments to ukraine because of their priority for use in trump's iran war. gee, go figure ...
It's a fucking circular firing squad....
typical, always fighting over the size of their slice before the cake batter gets mixed and goes into the oven ...
What have the American people ever done to deserve this?
Enough of them voted a for a guy with the values of Donald Trump. They got what they voted for, and the rest of us get to live through (hopefully) this nightmare.
Some Americans deserve his insanity. But I still hope the majority doesn't.
I married a MAGA and gave birth to one so I guess I deserve it
I must admit, watching Trump fester rent free in some Americans heads for all these years has been hilarious.
I am an American. Healthcare is too expensive for anyone of lower to middle income to afford. Grocery prices are through the roof. The US has bombed eight countries under the wannabe Nobel peace prize dictator’s “leadership”. Gas is 50 cents a gallon more expensive than last week and rising. Trump tried to blame Iran for the deaths of 165+ children and educators with a weapon that only the US possesses in this war of choice. The list of appalling circumstances created by this incompetent fool is endless. But yeah, keep pretending everything’s fine.
More Americans voted for Trump than did for the DEI VP and her solen valor VP candidate.
That is one hell of a bullet we dodged.
They're shooting themselves in their toes. Next they will be shooting each other
If there were a god they’d already be gone. They know there isn’t one just as much as I do, but they are conniving, conspiratorial sleazebags who would never let an opportunity to prey on suckers go unused. They wear Jesus on their sleeves as they do the work of a devil.
there's no shortage of gullible morons with imaginary friends on this planet ...
You are a partisan which I will demonstrate below.
I thought Obamacare was supposed to fix that. No?
Did you speak up when inflation was at 40 year record highs under Democrats? Nah, you waited for conservatives to get in power to do that.
Did you complain when your “actual” Nobel prize winner bombed other countries or set deportation records? Nope, no way.
Yep, just following Democrats lead from the Biden years. “It’s all someone’s else’s fault.”
Nonsense.[✘]
I know. It’s scary how close we came to that. And just because of TDS. Pretty sad.
Not only did he not speak up with this, there was nary a word about Obama's 7 month, no Congressional approval, hit on Syria. Even Pelosi said he didn't need it. She has changed her tune. Wonder why s/
Also, gas topped off at over 5 dollars a gallon in 2022, but zero from the left wing partisans.
Yep, not a peep.
[deleted][✘]
Once of the most prolific Trump supporters on this site calling anyone partisan. Wow. Just, wow.
So no coherent reply
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