We recently published a list of the 10 Best Drone Stocks to Buy According to Billionaires. In this article, we look at where Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) stands against other best drone stocks.

Over the past week, swarms of loitering drones filled the skies of India and Pakistan as the two nuclear-armed neighbors in South Asia waged what the BBC described as the world’s first drone war. This revolution in warfare has blurred the lines between man and machine, resulting in a need for a reassessment of military capabilities.

READ ALSO: 10 Best Military Drone Stocks to Buy Now and Goldman Sachs Defense Stocks: Top 12 Stock Picks.

Drones were a prominent feature of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and have also clouded the skies across several towns and cities during the Russia-Ukraine war. With the demand for drones surging over the last few years, defense tech start-ups such as Anduril Industries are redefining modern warfare through the next generation of autonomous, AI-driven systems.

The company has built a range of modular, AI-guided drones and uncrewed aircraft for the US military, which is presenting a challenge for traditional defense contractors, due to its superior tech defense capabilities that are cheaper and autonomous.

In December last year, Anduril announced a partnership with OpenAI, which will further enable the deployment of advanced AI systems for defense missions. The move is part of a growing trend among artificial intelligence companies to walk back bans on the military use of their products, with many firms entering into partnerships with the Department of Defense.

Anduril is also working on guarding against the threats posed by UAVs. In October 2024, the DoD awarded a $250 million contract to the company to counter drone attacks against American forces. Under the contract, the US will receive 500 recoverable Roadrunner interceptors, which are reusable drones that can intercept incoming drones or land back on the ground if they are not engaged.

When people think of drones, they often associate them with expensive military aircraft or personal recreational use. However, several corporations are now utilizing drones for commercial applications, such as deliveries, data collection, and inspections.

According to a report in January this year, the global commercial drone market size was estimated to have a value of $29.91 billion in 2024. It is projected to reach $33.96 billion in 2025 and climb to $93.78 billion by 2033, amid a surge in the deployment of drones for commercial operations.

With that said, let’s now head over to the list of the best drone stocks to buy according to billionaires.

Our Methodology

We sampled stocks from ETFs with exposure to drones and our previous articles on the subject. The pool of stocks included both military and non-military drone companies that develop and explore solutions to enable drone technologies to operate more efficiently.

From there, we picked the top 10 stocks with the highest number of billionaires having a stake in them, as per Insider Monkey’s Q4 2024 proprietary database of billionaires’ stock holdings. Where two or more stocks were tied on billionaire sentiment, we used the dollar value of billionaire holdings as a tiebreaker between them.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).

Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT)

Number of Billionaires: 13

Billionaire Holdings: $1,297,066,521

Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) is one of the largest defense contractors in the world. It is famed for manufacturing notable fighter jets, including the F-35. The company also delivers advanced autonomous solutions to the US military to meet the needs of its most demanding missions.

In March, after extensive flights earlier in the year, Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT)’s Sikorsky successfully proved the capability of a ‘rotor-blown wing’ UAS in airplane and helicopter modes. The battery-powered, 52-kg drone demonstrated maneuverability and operational stability across all flight regimes, and can also be scaled to larger sizes with hybrid-electric propulsion.

Other prominent UAVs developed by Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) include the RQ-170 Sentinel, Stalker, and Indago 4. The company continues to invest heavily in autonomy and artificial intelligence. It has demonstrated its capabilities in crewed-uncrewed teaming, AI-driven autonomous systems, and integrated technologies at numerous recent US Army events.

Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) demonstrated a new approach to countering drones by unveiling a scalable counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS), which is designed to detect, track, and defeat threats from UAVs. These developments reflect the company’s immense significance in the drone market.

With holdings worth nearly $1.3 billion from 13 billionaires, Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) is one of the best drone stocks to buy right now.

Overall, LMT ranks 5th among the 10 Best Drone Stocks to Buy According to Billionaires. While we acknowledge the potential of LMT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than LMT but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.