These professional drone-thletes — typically recruited by the DRL from YouTube videos — get paid to participate, though Horbaczewski declined to share how much. (He considers it a red herring. “The right question is, why do pilots fly?” he tells me. “Because they want to be a champion. Because we’re building the most elaborate race courses in the world, and it’s a chance for them to fly something they’ve never seen in their whole life.”)