One of the richest people in crypto, Justin Sun didn&'t make his way to the top by upholding himself to the highest business ethics standards. Quite the contrary, Sun&'s rise to prominence has been marred by numerous regulatory troubles and legal woes, but the unsinkable entrepreneur always managed to get out of trouble when even the most established figures in the industry didn&'t make it out unscratched.

With that said, one can&'t help but wonder: what is the secret to Justin Sun&'s uninterrupted success story? In this article, we try to answer the question by taking an in-depth look at his most successful ventures, the personality of Justin Sun, net worth, and the most buzz-worthy controversies.

Early life and education

Justin Sun was born on July 30, 1990, in Xining, the capital of China&'s western province of Qinghai. As a high school student, he wasn&'t particularly engaged in class, and his performance was far from stellar, Sun recalls in his 2017 autobiography, Brave New World. However, by his second year of high school, Justin realized that he should either bootstrap himself into good grades or give up forever on his dream of moving to Beijing and climbing up the social ladder.

After putting a tremendous amount of work into his university entrance exams, Sun was admitted to Peking University, one of the oldest and most renowned academic institutions in China known for its extremely competitive selection process. He graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a major in history and then went on to pursue a Master’s degree in East Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

During his time at UPenn, Sun discovered his passion for the crypto industry and elevated his net worth to seven figures by investing in Bitcoin early. After his graduation and return to Beijing in 2013, he found employment at Ripple Labs, the US company behind the Ripple payment protocol and XRP cryptocurrency. The same year, Sun also founded Peiwo, a voice-based social media platform, which was later shut down by the Chinese regulators on grounds of "disrupting socialist values," as the most in-demand content offered by the app turned out to be aural pornography. Needless to say, pornography is strictly forbidden in China, and anyone caught producing, disseminating, or selling "obscene materials" may be sentenced to life imprisonment.

According to the South China Morning Post, the rising crypto mogul was in the inaugural class at Hupan University, a private business school and startup incubator co-founded by Jack Ma, the former CEO of Alibaba. Sun graduated from Hupan University in 2018 after submitting a thesis titled The Birth of a Decentralized Internet, where he explored the countless business opportunities offered by blockchain technology.

The creation of TRON

In 2017, Justin Sun founded the blockchain-based decentralized platform Tron and held an initial coin offering (ICO) for Tron&'s native token Tronix (TRX), which landed him a mention as a top entrepreneur on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2017 list. The launch became an immediate success, with more than $70 million raised, but not without the controversy for which the Chinese entrepreneur has become renowned.

TRX token sale was held just a couple of days before China banned ICOs entirely, claiming that this new type of fundraising via the sale of digital assets is "disrupting" the country&'s financial order. According to The Verge, Sun was tipped off by Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance, about the upcoming ban yet decided to go through with it anyway. Shortly after, he left China for the US, fearing retaliation from the Chinese government.

At the time of writing, the Tron network hosts over 4,000 decentralized applications (dApps) and over 150 million user accounts, boasting a market cap of $9.3 billion, as per data from CoinMarketCap. The development of the Tron network is overseen by the Singapore-based TRON Foundation, which used to be headed by Sun until he resigned from the position of CEO in late 2021. The company has subsequently reorganized as DAO, allowing users to participate in governance and decision-making via token voting.

Justin Sun acquires BitTorrent

Shortly after his escape from China to the US, Justin Sun started eyeing the next jewel to add to his cryptocurrency empire: BitTorrent, a file-sharing service and one of the world&'s most recognizable brands in peer-to-peer sharing technology. Although the protocol has largely shaped the modern internet, by 2018 the company was struggling to establish new revenue streams.

In August 2018, Sun purchased BitTorrent for $140 million. The highly publicized deal immediately found itself in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war, in which intellectual property theft has become the central issue. Sun, however, was undeterred by the escalating tensions between the two superpowers and announced that the file-sharing protocol would launch its own utility token, BTT, which is designed to add incentives to torrenting by enabling users to pay for increased download speed and compensating providers for sharing the content.

Unable to secure the legal opinion that would shield BTT token sale from regulatory scrutiny, Justin Sun opted for an airdrop instead, meaning that new tokens were handed out to TRX holders for free. As it would become apparent in the future, it was insufficient to protect Tron from the watchful eye of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Acquisition of Poloniex exchange

In 2019, Justin Sun acquired the troubled cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex from stablecoin issuer Circle. Although initially the founder of Tron denied his involvement, he later admitted that he was among several investors in Poloniex, but claimed that the exchange operated independently from his core business.

The reports, however, paint a different picture of Sun&'s degree of ownership over Poloniex, revealing him as the sole decision-maker for the ailing exchange. According to The Verge, Sun&'s business vision for Poloniex was essentially to bring it back to the gray zone, where it thrived before the acquisition by Circle. Known for its lax approach to token listings and lack of KYC, back in the day Poloniex exchange used to be one of the most ruthless shitcoin casinos in the cryptocurrency industry.

When Circle took the reins, it took drastic measures to purge illicit activity from the platform. As it turned out, Poloniex&'s relaxed approach to customer scrutiny was what made it so popular in the first place, so its trading volume started to dwindle steadily. The exchange that once commanded over 50 percent of all crypto transactions had little more than 1 percent of the total exchange volume by the time of Sun&'s takeover in 2019.

To pump new blood into the ailing exchange, Justin Sun decided to shift away from the US to the global market, with a particular focus on China. To woo Chinese traders, Poloniex registered a new domain pwang.com that would redirect users to the platform and started accepting Chinese government IDs for KYC checks. However, the compliance procedures were slowing user adoption, which enraged Sun. At one of the company meetings, he reportedly pushed the employees to fake the KYC. To maintain the facade of legitimacy, Poloniex built an automated KYC system that would approve any ID a user submits, even if it&'s a picture of a duck.

Verge&'s blasting article also shed some light on how Poloniex devs directed by Sun misappropriated millions in customers&' funds — the so-called Bitcoin dust created by users mistakenly sending BTS to wallets designed to only accept Tether&'s stablecoin USDT. Forgotten and unable to be claimed by its rightful owners, the dust that had accumulated since 2013 was worth serious money by 2021 — roughly 300 BTC, or about $20 million at the time. 

Although some Poloniex employees initially hoped that recovered Bitcoin dust would become an alternative revenue stream for the exchange, it became obvious that Sun intends to take all Bitcoin for himself only. During the meetings with people involved with the project, as reported by Verge, Sun repeatedly asked them "Where&'s my 300 Bitcoin?"

During the recovery operation, nearly all the Bitcoin dust has been siphoned in synchrony from thousands of old addresses and then transferred to the exchange&'s communal wallet, where the trace of it is lost. For what it&'s worth, Justin Sun categorically denied the Verge&'s allegations, denouncing the article as a "blatant defamation."

Justin Sun&'s art collection

Besides his crypto ventures, Justin Sun is also a well-known art connoisseur, having spent more than $100 million on artworks by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Alberto Giacometti. All three of these works Sun donated to his APENFT Foundation, which was established with a mission “to promote the fusion of finance and art in the metaverse” and is linked to the NFT marketplace of the same name.

Moreover, Sun is also an avid NFT collector, featuring more than 250 pieces on his OpenSea profile, including a CryptoKittie, a CryptoPunk, FEWOCiOUS, and Voxels. In 2021, the Tron CEO also bagged a $500,000 digital image of a rock from the EtherRock collection and made headlines as the underbidder for Beeple’s $69 million Everydays: the First 5000 Days.

Sun also revealed himself as a $28 million auction winner for a seat on Blue Origin&'s first crewed spaceflight, announcing that he would handpick five people to join him.

Lunch with Warren Buffett

In 2019, Sun shocked his followers on social media platforms by announcing that he bid a record $4.57 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett, one of the best-known investors in the world and a staunch critic of cryptocurrencies. A highly publicized lunch in the middle of the US-China trade war, to which Sun has also invited President Trump, immediately provoked opposition from Chinese authorities, who essentially demanded Sun cancel the event.

As Sun kept ignoring the messages, the authorities targeted Tron, raiding the company&'s Beijing office and detaining six employees, along with Sun’s estranged father. According to The Verge, an emergency “war council” convened by Tron advised Sun to get out of lunch with Buffett by coming up with a medical excuse. As a result, it was announced that Sam suffered from kidney stones, and the event was postponed indefinitely.

As the dust settled, Sun finally got his pricey dinner with Buffett in February 2020, to which he also invited several guests, namely Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, eToro CEO Yoni Assia, Huobi CFO Chris Lee, and head of the Binance Charity Foundation, Helen Hai. During the lunch, Sun gifted Buffett one Bitcoin stored in a Samsung Galaxy Fold in hopes of inspiring a change of heart in the conservative investor who on several occasions dismissed Bitcoin as a gambling token and an investment bubble with no intrinsic value.

Beef with Vitalik Buterin

In January 2018, Tron became embroiled in plagiarism accusations after the crypto community noticed some striking similarities between Tron&'s white paper and other cryptocurrency projects. Juan Benet, the CEO of Filecoin&'s Protocol Labs, did his own research and concluded that at least nine pages were blatantly copied from Ethereum&'s and Filecoin&'s white papers, without a single reference.

Although Justin Sun was quick to blame the controversy on translation issues, claiming that the volunteer translators must have eliminated citations that were present in the original Chinese white paper, some pointed out that the same pieces of code from other projects were spotted in the Chinese version without proper attribution.

As the plagiarism controversy unfolded, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, couldn&'t resist a cheeky dig at Tron, responding to a tweet by Sun that listed the advantages of the ecosystem with an ironic praise of Tron&'s white paper Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V capabilities.

For what it&'s worth, this wasn&'t the end of the beef between the two founders of rivaling crypto platforms. After a particularly weird Twitter spat that involved avocados, Sun decided to bring it to real life, interrupting Buterin&'s keynote speech at one of the conferences by entering with a man dressed in an avocado suit. When asked about his odd performance, the Tron founder explained that this was due to his firmly held belief about Ethereum&'s lack of readiness for the proof-of-stake transition. Still, it wasn&'t immediately clear what avocados had to do with all of this.

Justin Sun net worth 2024

According to Arkham, Justin Sun&'s net worth stands at over $1.3 billion, which makes Tron&'s founder one of the richest people in crypto. It&'s worth noting that this figure estimates only his on-chain crypto holdings, and doesn&'t take into account Sun&'s other personal investments, such as collectibles, financial securities, and real estate. It also excludes Sun&'s possible Bitcoin investments, which may amount to more than $580 million managed by Valkyrie Investments, as per CoinDesk&'s report.

At the time of writing, Justin Sun&'s publicly known crypto wallet has $1.36 billion worth of assets. His largest holding is WSTETH, a wrapped version of staked Ether, of which Sun owns $400 million. His second-largest holding of $278 million is USDD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by the TRON DAO Reserve. The next biggest holdings in Sun&'s wallet are Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) worth $221 million and $122 million, respectively.

Of course, there&'s also a chance that Justin Sun has other crypto wallets not yet tagged as belonging to him, which, if true, would bring his estimated net worth even higher. Lastly, a significant part of the Tron founder&'s wealth can also be tied to his private investments and shares in various blockchain-based projects, such as Animoca Brands, a blockchain and crypto video games maker that welcomed Sun&'s participation in its October 2021 $65 million funding round.

The many legal woes of Justin Sun

Embroiled in numerous controversies over his business practices, it was only a matter of time before Justin Sun came under the scrutiny of the SEC, the US financial watchdog infamous for its hostility towards the crypto industry.

In March 2023, the Commission charged Sun and three of his crypto-related businesses, Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent), with fraud and unregistered securities offering related to TRX and BTT token sales. The SEC&'s complaint also alleged that Sun and his companies manipulated the secondary market for TRX through wash trading.

"From at least April 2018 through February 2019, Sun allegedly directed his employees to engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading platform accounts he controlled, with between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX wash traded daily," the commission said.

“This scheme required a significant supply of TRX, which Sun allegedly provided. As alleged, Sun also sold TRX into the secondary market, generating proceeds of $31 million from illegal, unregistered offers and sales of the token,” the complaint reads.

According to the 2021 report by The Verge, Justin Sun is also under investigation by the FBI for alleged tax evasion and a litany of other potential charges. Sun has already lawyered up, hiring a defense attorney named Telemachus Kasulis, who specializes in white-collar crimes.

In 2021, Sun, who is a citizen of Grenada, was appointed as the nation’s permanent representative to the World Trade Organization and has since loudly touted his diplomatic credentials, adding "His Excellency" title to his name on all his social media channels. As speculated by the crypto community, aside from vanity, the status also provided Sun with a very real benefit, namely diplomatic immunity, helpful in the light of his numerous legal woes.

However, as it turned out later, Sun&'s ambassadorship was revoked just months after his appointment after the New National Party that granted him the title lost the general election to the National Democratic Congress. After initially denying the loss of the status, Sun finally admitted it nearly eight months later after being recalled.

Bottom line

A colorful yet controversial figure in the crypto industry, Justin Sun has made numerous headlines as well as found himself in the limelight of the financial regulators&' attention. One of the wealthiest people in crypto, Sun has so far seemed unsinkable, despite the general wariness towards his projects among the crypto community. However, this is likely to change for Sun, given the recent demise of his most powerful ally, Binance&'s former CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao.

On a related note, check out our profiles for other crypto personalities, namely Richard Teng of Binance, Hayden Adams of Uniswap, and NFT artist Beeple.