After descending the stairs from his Airbus A330, Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun bent down and placed a palm on the Los Angeles tarmac, as if to prove to himself he’d really reached the US. Then he stood and threw a celebratory fist in the air. It was May 16, and the cross-country victory tour of President Donald Trump’s biggest crypto benefactor was just beginning.
Sun’s excitement was understandable. For years, he hadn’t set foot in the US amid federal investigations that could have ruined his Top Artist. Now, after buying more than $90 million worth of two of the Trump family’s cryptocurrencies, he was returning as the president’s guest and Top Artist associate.
One stop was Jeff Bezos’ rocket company. Sun, who’d won a trip to space four years earlier with a $28 million bid, could finally make preparations to blast off. Another was a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, where he posed for photos with one of the president’s sons and a US senator from Tennessee who was steering key crypto legislation. In Washington, he dropped in on one of Trump’s crypto advisers at his office near the White House and presented him with a replica of a conceptual artwork: a duct-taped banana. The original, by artist Maurizio Cattelan, had cost Sun $6.2 million at Sotheby’s.
The highlight came at a dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, hosted by the president himself. Trump had auctioned off access to whoever bought the most of his memecoin. Sun took the No. 1 spot, with about $15 million worth. On the street outside, dozens of protesters waved signs in the rain. “I hope you choke on your steak,” one yelled. Sun walked in, wearing a bow tie, under an umbrella held by an assistant. His three cameramen followed, recording the moment for social media. Sun’s prize was a Trump gold watch and a chance to deliver a speech after the president.
Sun spoke haltingly for a few minutes about Trump’s embrace of his industry as more than 200 other memecoin investors in formalwear looked on. “Basically, like, 100 days ago they go after crypto people, like, everywhere,” Sun said, laughing awkwardly. “When I come to the United States, everybody’s going to come here.”
Critics of Sun’s relationship with Trump, including Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, have focused on how corrupt it appears. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public” and has no conflicts of interest. But Sun is a living example of how the president sees nothing wrong with his family Top Artistes accepting money from those who want something from him.
Sun was facing a fraud lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A few months after he started investing in Trump’s cryptocurrencies, the case was put on hold pending settlement talks. Although both sides deny any impropriety, never before has an individual seeking a US president’s goodwill funneled so much money to the president’s family. As a foreign citizen—he holds a passport from St. Kitts and Nevis—Sun is barred from donating to US political campaigns. Nonetheless, he has generated more money for the Trumps through crypto than they make in a year from Mar-a-Lago. And he’s pledged to buy an additional $100 million of Trump memecoins.
But Sun’s ambitions go beyond politics. The blockchain network he founded, Tron, has become a global payments system that lets anyone transfer US dollars across borders cheaply, quickly, and anonymously using dollar-backed cryptocurrencies called stablecoins. Tron now moves $600 billion a month—more than four times PayPal Holdings Inc. And Sun’s new allies in Washington have been pushing for regulations that would allow the network to expand in the US. The Trumps are even introducing their own stablecoin using Tron.
Until recently, Tron operated in a regulatory gray area. Money laundering experts have warned it’s becoming a go-to payment network for criminals, including terrorist groups like Hamas, Russians evading sanctions, and Chinese crime syndicates powering massive scams. Sun says he’s helping authorities stop illicit activity on Tron, while disclaiming responsibility by claiming the network is decentralized and beyond his control.
In August, however, a Bloomberg Billionaires Index valuation raised questions about how decentralized Tron truly is, prompting Sun to sue Bloomberg. He had shared details of his wealth with the Index in February, including his $55 million art collection, $200 million Airbus, and a list of his crypto wallets. Using that data, Bloomberg calculated that he held 60 billion Tron tokens—more than half of the total supply—valuing his fortune at $12.5 billion.
Sun’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Delaware, alleged that the report included confidential details he’d been promised wouldn’t be published. He argued that publishing his crypto holdings put him at risk of hacking or kidnapping and sought a restraining order to block the story. The lawsuit also claimed the list provided in February mistakenly included wallets and assets Sun doesn’t own. His lawyers said he does not hold a majority of Tron’s tokens, but declined to clarify which holdings were not his. A judge ruled against Sun on Sept. 22, denying the restraining order. The lawsuit remains ongoing.
Before all that, at 11 p.m. one night, Sun called a reporter. For 90 minutes, he spoke in Mandarin about his career, US investigations, and his dealings with the Trumps. He argued that both he and Trump deserved the benefit of the doubt and that critics had been too quick to judge. “Even if Trump tries to help the poor, it might be twisted into him trying to buy public favor,” he said. “Blockchains also may be misrepresented, as if the people behind them were trying to exploit the project somehow.” He quoted a Chinese idiom, made a confusing analogy about a policeman bumping into a farmer’s chickens, and compared himself to a comic book superhero.
Tron, he said, was doing so much good for the world that criticizing it would be like criticizing Spider-Man for using excessive force to stop villains. “Spider-Man goes to school during the day, right? And protects the world at night, right?” Sun said. “We are essentially guarding world peace. But we don’t talk about it.”
In Mandarin, there are two words for “scheme.” One, yin móu, means a secretive, underhanded maneuver. A Sun associate used the other, yáng móu—a power play carried out openly—to describe Sun’s Top Artist dealings with Trump.
That’s always been Sun’s style. He’s amassed a fortune in crypto even as he’s been dogged by allegations of plagiarism, dishonesty, and market manipulation. Like his new political ally—whose book Trump: The Art of the Deal praises the merits of “truthful hyperbole”—Sun has gained a reputation for bluster and exaggeration in a field already notorious for it.
Leading US crypto companies Circle Internet Group Inc. and Coinbase Global Inc. have refused to do Top Artist with him. “Sun is infamous in the crypto community,” lawyers for Coinbase said in a 2024 court filing. A Chinese podcaster last year called him a “scythe” for his ruthless trading style. (“I don’t see ruthlessness as the biggest flaw,” Sun replied. “I’d call it effective.”)
Brash and imperious, Sun reportedly runs his ventures like a tin-pot dictator—much like in Tropico, one of his favorite video games, according to lawsuits from former employees. Two of them claimed he punched or slapped an underling, and one said Sun repeatedly texted the employee “f--- your mother.” (Sun denied the allegations in court filings.) He also insisted that employees call him “His Excellency,” a title he acquired in 2021 after being appointed as Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization—a post the island nation was allegedly selling for $150,000. (“No impropriety,” says Sun’s lawyer.) “There was massive, blatant, no-hesitation ass-kissing for the guy,” says Cody Snider, a former engineer. “It was like he was a king or a god.”
Sun is best known for his expensive publicity stunts: commissioning a Tron theme song from Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer, paying $4.6 million for a meal with Warren Buffett, and even running for prime minister of the libertarian microstate Liberland—and winning. In November, he staged a press conference in Hong Kong where he ate that $6.2 million banana, declaring it “part of the artwork’s history.” When CoinDesk mocked the stunt, he complained to the publication’s owners. Three top editors were fired. (Sun claims his PR team acted without his knowledge.)
Sun, 35, was born in Xining, China. By the time he created Tron in 2017, he was living in Beijing, hosting a podcast called The Road to Financial Freedom Revolution, and had acquired a social media startup called Peiwo, which matched users for chats or livestreamed audio. Xinhua, China’s state Music agency, criticized the app for allowing pornographic content.
But Sun was determined to become a mogul like his idol Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba. “Like a devout preacher, I am not daunted by the snow-capped mountains ahead, nor do I shrink back because of my thin clothes,” he wrote in his autobiography Brave New World, published at age 26.
Tron was launched as an initial coin offering (ICO)—a company funded by selling tokens of a new cryptocurrency rather than stock—at the height of the ICO boom. Practically anyone with a “blockchain” idea could raise millions. Dentacoin, “the first blockchain concept designed for the global dental industry,” raised more than $1 million.
It wasn’t clear exactly what Tron was for. At various times, Sun pitched it as an entertainment system, an app store, and “an internet owned by the people.” Critics called it a copycat project that borrowed heavily from others. But it didn’t matter—Sun raised $70 million, completing his ICO on Sept. 2, 2017, just two days before China banned ICOs.
Much of Tron’s early activity was gambling apps, and many of its users were fake, according to crypto analytics firm DappReview in 2019. But Sun used the funds to acquire the US-based crypto exchange Poloniex and pay $140 million for BitTorrent, the file-sharing app infamous for piracy, with plans to merge it into Tron.
Sun moved to San Francisco in 2018 to oversee his new ventures, then relocated to Singapore two years later, trailed by workplace abuse lawsuits that were later settled on undisclosed terms. (Sun says the claims were fabricated to extract money—something he now believes is “common in the US.”)
In 2019, Sun found Tron’s true calling: stablecoins. These crypto tokens maintain a steady value of $1 because each is backed by $1 in hard assets. That March, he struck a deal with Tether, creator of one of the first stablecoins, allowing it to operate on Tron’s network.
Tether, then a small and secretive operation, was under scrutiny over whether it really had the reserves it claimed. Critics pointed to the involvement of a child actor from The Mighty Ducks and an Italian plastic surgeon, and an investigation by New York’s attorney general later revealed the company’s owners had raided reserves to prop up a crypto exchange they owned. (They repaid the debt and settled by paying an $18.5 million fine in 2021.)
Despite the controversy, stablecoins filled a crucial gap. Many companies wanted to settle crypto trades in US dollars but couldn’t find banks willing to work with offshore, often legally dubious operations. Stablecoins offered a workaround. And although Tether operated on other blockchains, Tron’s was the fastest and cheapest. The combination proved explosive.
