The Degenerates of the Drone Stock Bubble |
Late last summer, the founders of a small company in Ukraine that made software to manage swarms of drones were weighing whether to work with Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. “Erik Prince is fucking cruising around telling everybody that he’s going to take them big time and he’s best friends with Trump and Hegseth and all these people and he wants to invest,” recalled an individual who spoke with the founders and advised them against collaboration. “You’re bringing in a guy who’s going to bring about the downfall of your company.”
In the past, Prince has been the Forrest Gump of national security scandals, from the infamous 2007 Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, when Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians, to the FBI investigation of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, which involved Prince acting as a mediator with a Kremlin representative. More recently, he’s been spotted at Mar-a-Lago and has continued to work in the private military business, which includes deploying armed drones as part of his latest venture. In March, the software company Swarmer debuted on the U.S. stock market with Prince as its non-executive chairman.
The previously unknown company skyrocketed in value in its first days of trading, rising more than 1,200 percent for a market capitalization of around $800 million.
The timing was fortuitous. Its stock-market debut took place just weeks after the start of U.S. military operations against Iran, the latest conflict to underscore the growing prevalence of drone warfare. And Swarmer’s technology was rumored to be involved in Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine’s June 2025 drone attack inside Russia that destroyed dozens of Moscow’s warplanes.
Officially, though, the company only admits its products have been used in “more than 100,000 real-world missions in active combat environments.”
The problem? Swarmer has limited sales and its revenue actually dropped in the year before going public, from a paltry $329,410 to an even worse $309,920. Its S-1, a document companies file when they go public, says it has contracts that will bring in $16.3 million over the next one-to-two years but also disclosed that it was losing a significant amount of money and may never be profitable. “There is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” it read.
The brutal war in Ukraine and its heavy reliance on drones has changed the face of modern warfare. It’s also led to the meteoric rise of companies like Swarmer, part of a growing investor craze that can sometimes be entirely divorced from financial fundamentals. The Department of War has declared plans for “drone dominance,” which involves buying hundreds of thousands of small drones. Drone companies are attracting well-known names, including President Donald Trump’s older sons and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. Yet much of the funding is coming from retail investors — primarily young men — influenced by social media and motivated by a mix of patriotism, easy money, and a morbid fascination with a war that is streaming daily on their phones.
“I think that for many people, it’s almost like just leaning into dystopian technology, embracing modern warfare, embracing the destruction of societies and people,” said Michael Sikand, a prominent financial influencer on social media. “It’s almost just like, Okay, if this is where the world is going; we need to put our money into this.”
Joe Pivarunas, the managing director of Nanalyze, a research firm that focuses on disruptive tech stocks, is particularly bothered by financial influencers who are now pumping drone stocks, especially when they own the stocks they pitch. “These guys, their thought process is, I’m going to pump, pump, pump, because I’ve got media and I’ve got attention,” Pivarunas said. He makes videos mixing humor and financial analysis designed to educate the retail investors who buy high-risk stocks, i.e., degens — slang for “degenerates.” “Social media, I believe, is one of the worst things that happened to retail investors,” he told me.
The tendency of young men to gravitate to risky stocks has been described as “financial nihilism,” and experts have fretted about what it means for the future. Even some of the financial influencers acknowledged that their young male followers are chasing casinolike payouts. “Men always have that degenerate gambling gene,”........