The Rise of Drone Shows: From Vatican Spectacles to Corporate Events

One September night in 2025, the luminous face of Baby Jesus appeared in the sky over the Vatican—clearly, verifiably, witnessed by tens of thousands. It was some two millennia after the Book of Revelation prophesied, in John’s apocalyptic vision, that “he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him.” Soon, the image transfigured into the late Pope Francis. In a spectacle at once holy and cyberpunk, the papal face blazing across the Roman sky was pixelated—composed not of divine light, but of drones.

Accompanying the apparition wasn’t a seraphic choir but two earthbound mortals, hundreds of feet below, singing “Amazing Grace”: the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and, bejeweled in gold chains and cross pendants, the face-tattooed American Teddy Swims. Later to appear above the basilica was a pointillistic rendering of a colossal Pietà, which soon reassembled into the two outstretched fingers of Michelangelo’s famous fresco. Some members of the crowd packed into St. Peter’s Square for “Grace for the World”—the first concert ever held on this holy ground—wept.

The drone show in the Vatican sky was produced by Nova Sky Stories, a company owned by Kimbal Musk, younger brother of Elon (who, in a sense, owns the rest of the sky with his rockets and satellites). One recent afternoon in San Francisco, Kimbal recounted that night to me. “In a world where all the religious people are fighting each other, it was really a powerful message,” he said. Kimbal is the folksier Musk, with his signature cowboy hat and air of a small-town mayor. He found it surreal to be in a WhatsApp thread where Vatican officials and representatives for Pharrell debated artistic direction.

You could say that the unlikely crossover between drones and the papacy has its origins, as these things do, at Burning Man. In 2021, when the event was canceled due to the pandemic, Kimbal convinced longtime burners to join him in Black Rock Desert for an unofficial gathering that became known as the Free Burn. Typically, Burning Man ends with the torching of a massive human-shaped effigy—the eponymous Man—but that year, the US Bureau of Land Management forbade desert-goers from lighting anything on fire.

Present at the Free Burn was Ralph Nauta, a Dutch artist who works with light and technology. Kimbal asked if he could perform a fireless spectacle for the final night, and Nauta obliged. A crowd gathered on the playa as Nauta released a swarm of drones that floated over the earth for a few minutes before snapping into the dotted contour of the Man. The crowd gasped, then roared. The figure slowly raised its arms, turned flame-red, and vanished. “Everyone, including me, we were just in tears, absolute tears,” Kimbal said. “It was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of my life.”

A year later, Kimbal founded Nova Sky Stories; investors in the company’s latest $50 million round included the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who joined the board after witnessing a drone show in 2022 at—where else?—Burning Man. A drone show has transformative properties, Kimbal said: “The cynic in you goes away. It’s like a mainline to the spiritual center.” He told me that Pope Leo, who watched the Vatican show from a nearby apartment, passed him a note afterward. “His words,” Kimbal said, “were that I made Michelangelo proud.”

Although robotics researchers and independent artists had been playing with drones for years (Nauta started experimenting back in 2008), the drone show as we know it began in earnest in 2015. That’s when Intel, with 100 drones, set the first Guinness World Record for “Most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Airborne Simultaneously,” upping the ante for performances to come. In 2017, hundreds of drones were flown as a backdrop to Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, and today they’re summoned by the thousands at theme parks and Netflix premieres. In 2025, the Rose Bowl replaced its long-running July Fourth fireworks show with a drone show, as Napa and Salt Lake City had done in years prior. It’s safe to say that this year’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday will feature more drone shows than ever.

I came to the medium as many do: in enscreened form, on my iPhone’s 6-inch display. In the summer of 2025, Steph Curry was in China, where he witnessed a Godzilla-sized version of himself and a panda do a slo-mo high five over the skyline of Chongqing. “That’s the wildest thing I’ve seen in a while,” Curry told the Daily Mail. “5,000 drones going crazy right now.” As I watched the video on YouTube, I was baffled by contradictory emotions washing over me. My instinct was to shrug off what seemed like a newfangled technological gimmick, but I could hardly contain my glee. Next, I saw a video of the characters from KPop Demon Hunters materializing above Seoul, the city I grew up in. I messaged my parents. Had they seen this? Yes, they said. Have you not seen a drone show?

Even with an untrained eye, I could tell that quality varied. Some animations were clumsy and unimaginaginative—corporate logos, assemblages of geometric primitives. Others, however, were transcendent visuals, rendered with precision and pomp. There was a Guinness World Record–setting video from China (7,598 drones) featuring a dragon with shining, tessellated scales large enough to encircle a skyscraper. In Dubai, sky divers flew into a Red Bull can made of drones. Stranger Things’ Vecna crawled out of the Las Vegas Strip’s sky. A phoenix whose wings were composed of “pyrodrones”—fireworks attached to drones—released a waterfall of sparks. In Saudi Arabia, drones coalesced into the face of Mohammed bin Salman. Tetris was being played in the heavens. Nyan Cat was flying in the sky.

A prudish reader might kvetch: But aren’t drones weapons of war? Well, weren’t fireworks born of gunpowder? Perhaps the menace of the medium is part of what gives it its charge. Here was a formidable technology—something that, if shown in medieval times, might have turned a raging infidel into the most ardent believer.

Modern man, it turns out, is just as susceptible.

Kimbal Musk’s Nova Sky Stories may be the only drone operator blessed by the Holy Father, but the biggest by show count in America is a company called Sky Elements. One Friday during the thick of March Madness, I headed to San Jose to watch Sky Elements prepare for one of its shows.

The number of drones flying that day was 1,000. (The cost of a drone show depends on the number of drones—currently $150 to $200 per drone.) I was greeted by Preston Ward, Sky Elements’ cofounder, whose face I recognized from a popular Instagram account he runs (@thatdroneshowguy) with close to a million followers. Ward was a commercial litigation lawyer in a former life. Underneath his disarming smile, I got the unmistakable sense that you’d not want to see his face across the negotiating table. After all, here was the man who convinced the Federal Aviation Administration, in 2024, to let him strap fireworks to drones—hence the advent of pyrodrones in American airspace.

Setting up a drone show is a labor-intensive, time-consuming affair. Preparation for the 9:15 pm show started at 2 pm, and by the time I’d arrived, the crew had already unloaded boxes of drones, plus metal-gray ammo cans storing lithium batteries, from an Enterprise semitruck. With the crew bustling about in reflective safety vests and radio headsets, the scene resembled a small airfield. Indeed, drones are classified as aircraft by the FAA, which requires that show operators get a “Part 107 license” for commercial use.

As the crew began unboxing drones—made by UVify, a South Korean company and major drone supplier to American operators—I bent to examine one. It had four carbon-fiber arms reaching to propellers colored in red and black, and its opaline plastic body encased the LEDs that would become an illuminated voxel in the sky. Resting there in its crustacean squat, it was oddly adorable.

Nearby stood a heavy-duty tripod with a disc-shaped sensor mounted at the top. Called an RTK base station, it’s a vital piece of equipment for any drone show. Standard GPS is accurate only to about 2 to 5 meters, so light-show drones rely on this real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning technology to broadcast correction signals that allow centimeter-level accuracy. I’d received a site plan in advance and noticed that the launch pad was encircled by the flight area, followed by a soft geofence (where drones would return if they drifted off course) and a hard geofence (where they’d shut down and abort).

By 6 pm, the drones were laid out in a 20-by-50 grid about a meter apart, batteries inserted into the body but cables not yet plugged in. After a break for dinner, the crew lined up on one side and marched down each row, connecting batteries one by one. I joined in and plugged the connectors into place. With each connection came a brief electronic trill as the drone came to life. The pilot and copilot hunched over their laptops, running final checks on the flight software. I glanced at the pilot checklist—over 60 items.

Ward and I settled into picnic chairs to watch what had become my most anticipated part of a drone show: takeoff. A thousand opalescent orbs of LED light came on, and 4,000 propellers started spinning. The drones launched in four sequences of 25-by-10 rectangular formations, each planar unit rising in blue, red, green, yellow, like a colorful deck of cards fanning open into the sky. (Each drone, unlike the autonomous swarms often used by militaries, is not aware of any other drone’s existence. It simply follows its programmed path and comes back.)

A “San Jose 2026” logo was emblazoned in the sky, followed by a basketball hoop and various March Madness–themed shapes, intercut with the sponsor logos (Adobe, Waymo). Sharp at a distance, the formations, on closer look, showed a slight undulation and sway, perhaps from a night wind. I could occasionally see stragglers finding their way back into formation like klutzy soldiers. After about 10 minutes, the drones formed into a tight phalanx for the landing sequence. As they descended, the grass field rippled. They sent a gentle downwash over the ground, knocking over an empty water bottle.

After talking to a number of drone operators—small and large, regional and national—I became attuned to a certain drama among them, which is to say, the industry is not exactly suffused with bonhomie. Some dismissed their rivals’ work as “clip art,” others as just good marketing. I heard the word “litigious” now and again.

Business models also vary widely. Some make drones, some make drone show software, some put on shows and sell software, some sell software but don’t make drones—every permutation is represented. Some position themselves as artists, while others are more utilitarian. As one executive at Pixis Drones told me, “We’re a marketing agency first, and we just happen to have a fleet of drones.” Some think “drone show” is an undignified name for such a futuristic medium. Kimbal Musk’s company prefers “sky stories,” and UVify prefers “cyber physical content.”

One Wednesday afternoon, at a coffee shop in Palo Alto that was being circled by a Tesla Cybercab every 15 minutes, I met Nils Thorjussen, a cofounder of Verge Aero, the second-largest drone operator in America—an occasional show provider that also sells drone software and hardware. Thorjussen, whose ruddy face reflects a lifelong affection for skiing (he had just come back from Tahoe), has been in the business of illumination for decades. After graduating from Stanford’s business school, he started a control systems business for large concerts and soon found himself touring with the Grateful Dead. One day he saw a TED talk showcasing drone light shows and was mesmerized.

When he got his FAA waiver in 2017, the number of drone operators was in the single digits. But as much as the industry has developed, Thorjussen said, it is still in a “carnival operator phase,” a “Wild West sort of environment” with “hustlers.” One recent scandal involved a guy named David Oneal and his company Wildly Creative Marketing. True to its name, Oneal’s company defrauded SeaWorld by agreeing to perform a drone show, collecting payment, and then never showing. After a joint investigation by the Department of Transportation and the US Secret Service, Oneal was convicted and sentenced to 32 months in prison.

Thorjussen has spent the past year working to establish a safety standard for drone shows, lest a major accident torpedo the young industry the way the Hindenburg did airships. The community is still rattled by an accident in December 2024, when, during a holiday show in Orlando operated by Sky Elements, drones fell from the sky and, according to a lawsuit, struck a 7-year-old boy, who needed open-heart surgery. (The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board, released in early 2025, attributed the cause to a combination of errors.) Thorjussen has enlisted the help of ASTM International, the organization behind standards for everything from bungee jumping to paint viscosity.

Another sore subject for the industry: China. The new Guinness records for most drones flown—the record that matters most—are now all set and broken and set again, often in a matter of weeks, by China. (At this writing, it’s 33,615 drones.) American reactions to this fact range from dismissal to resignation to admiration. Hayes Walsh of Sky Elements told me, “They’re pretty much light-years ahead of us in terms of scale.” One of the Chinese companies he’s talking about is Damoda, whose drones don’t require manually inserting batteries or laying them out in a grid. Instead, like worker bees coming in and out of their hexagonal hive, they launch from a charging case and return to it.

China also seems to stir concerns about industrial espionage. At least one executive I talked to confessed he had asked around about me because my surname also exists in Chinese. I started dropping hints early in conversations that I’m Korean.

A week after Sky Elements’ March Madness show, I paid a visit to the company’s Texas headquarters, a low, beige building in an office park. Preston Ward, the cofounder I’d first met in San Jose, was waiting near the entrance, where a wall celebrated the company’s 16 Guinness World Records (it’s now 17). Though China dominates the numbers game, Guinness—ever generous with categories—still leaves room for niche entries: “Largest aerial display of a currency symbol.” “Of a cowboy hat.” “Of a gingerbread village.”

Ward seemed to be in a buoyant mood about something he and others had been working on since the day before, which was an attempt to answer “everybody’s big question”: Can AI replace a lot of what they do? In less than 24 hours, Ward explained, an AI agent had already researched what software to use, designed a show, and emailed the head designer for review. Does it have a name? “Mavrick,” E