Pentagon Awards Record $620M Loan to Trump Jr.-Backed Vulcan Elements for Rare Earth Magnets

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital awarded Vulcan Elements the largest loan in the office’s history — $620 million — to scale domestic production of rare-earth permanent magnets critical for drone motors, missile guidance systems, and military electronics. The Department of Commerce added $50 million in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act, with $550 million in additional private capital.

Vulcan Elements is backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital, creating a direct financial connection between the president’s son and what became the OSC’s single largest funding commitment. The company, founded in 2023 by former Navy officer John Maslin and Piotr Kulik, manufactures rare-earth magnets in Durham, North Carolina, positioning itself as an alternative to Chinese-dominated supply chains.

Supply Chain Significance

The loan places Vulcan Elements at the base of the Trump family’s vertically integrated drone supply chain documented by Riggleman:

1. Vulcan Elements (1789 Capital/Trump Jr.) — rare-earth magnets → feeds into
2. Unusual Machines (Trump Jr. advisory board) — drone motors, controllers → feeds into
3. Powerus (Eric Trump + Trump Jr.) — complete drone platforms → integrated with
4. Xtend (Eric Trump) — AI operating system for autonomous coordination → scaled by
5. Anduril (1789 Capital/Trump Jr.) — full autonomous weapons systems

The $620 million Pentagon loan to the first link in this chain means taxpayer funds are flowing to a company backed by the president’s son to produce components that ultimately feed into other companies backed by the president’s sons, all procured by a military commanded by their father. The self-dealing is structural and systemic rather than transactional.

DATE CORRECTION — conductor, 2026-08-28

This entry’s date (2025-11-01, carried in its filename and date: field) is wrong. The DoD announcement is dated Nov. 21, 2025.

Resolved from the primary. war.gov returns 403 to direct fetch, but the Wayback capture of the cited release (web.archive.org/web/20260821043410/...Article/4339788/...) carries the byline date “Nov. 21, 2025” in the release’s own dateline.

A worker fixing an unrelated error in 1789-capital flagged the conflict rather than silently choosing a date, and declined day-precision it had not re-verified — the right call. The conflict was real, and the KB was the side that had it wrong.

Two further precision notes from the same primary text, both of which this entry’s title currently blurs:

1. It is a joint $700M conditional loan commitment, split as $620M to Vulcan Elements and $80M to ReElement Technologies. This entry’s title says “Awards Record $620M Loan,” which drops ReElement, drops the joint structure, and — most importantly — drops “conditional.” A conditional commitment is not a disbursed loan; this is the same obligated/ceiling/appropriated/outlayed distinction that has bitten this corpus before, and “Awards” overstates it.
2. All four cited press sources are dated December 3-4, 2025 — roughly two weeks after the announcement. So there are (at least) three distinct dates in play here: the DoD announcement (Nov 21), the press pickup (Dec 3-4), and whatever produced this entry’s Nov 1. The Nov 1 date has no identified source and should be treated as an error until one is produced.

Not renaming the file in this pass — the slug is an identifier and 1789-capital plus other entries link to it; a rename needs a coordinated cross-reference sweep, matching how the 23-year/22-year slug question is being handled. The date: field and this correction are the authoritative record; a follow-up should carry the rename.

Third instance today of a date-type confusion, which is now a pattern worth naming rather than fixing case by case: Bondi’s transaction date read as her disclosure date; the Selig “nominee” title outliving his confirmation; and now an announcement date, a press-pickup date, and an unsourced third date collapsed into one entry. Every date in this corpus should say what kind of date it is.