On the evening of 22 May, the biggest investors in the $Trump memecoin – the US president’s personal crypto token – descended on the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia for an exclusive black-tie event.
Invited guests were the top 220 $Trump holders
. Blockchain analysis suggests that more than half were probably foreign investors who had collectively poured millions into the token. “What’s happening tonight at Trump’s golf course … is in effect putting a ‘for sale’ sign on the White House,” said Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal to reporters before the event, who called it “corruption”. The White House rejected the claim.
So did Justin Sun, the coin’s largest investor. “All the haters need to really pay attention,” said Sun on the CoinDesk website the following day, denying that he was buying access to the president. “There are positive things happening in the [crypto] industry.” Later, he posted a picture of himself on social media, fist in the air, standing in front of the American flag. On his wrist was a $100,000 watch made of 18-carat gold. The caption read: “I was awarded a Trump Golden Tourbillon watch by Trump!”
Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire worth about $8.5bn from crypto ventures, including the blockchain platform Tron, reportedly invested $20m in the memecoin to secure his place at the dinner. He had already poured a separate $75m into the Trump family’s crypto company World Liberty Financial (WLF). In February, five weeks after Trump became president, the US securities regulator shelved a 2023 civil fraud case against Sun that could have cost him millions in fines and repayments.
Since February, Sun’s business ties with the Trumps have deepened, even as questions surrounding his crypto empire remain unanswered. The entrepreneur is alleged to have made billions by finding ways around rules, selling hype and pushing the boundaries of the law. But instead of facing greater scrutiny, it appears Sun now finds himself closer than ever to the seat of American power.
In June, WLF moved its stablecoin – a type of digital token tied to real-world currency – on to Tron’s blockchain network, positioning Tron to make millions in transaction fees. Because WLF collects interest on the money backing the stablecoin, the president himself stands to profit from the deal too.
And reports recently emerged that Sun was taking Tron public in the US through a merger with the Nasdaq-listed company SRM Entertainment. The deal was orchestrated by Dominari Securities, an investment bank with ties to Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump. The
Financial Times
reported that Eric Trump was expected to take up a role at the new company – Tron Inc – though he later said on social media that he had no “public involvement” in the project.
“It is a potentially dangerous situation for the US and for the global economy when the government, which should be regulating the crypto industry, is being led by a president who has very close financial ties to individuals in the crypto industry”, said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W Bush, about the Trump family’s relationship with Sun. The White House has repeatedly denied any conflict of interest.
Sources, including former colleagues of Sun’s, as well as financial and legal experts, paint a complicated picture of the crypto mogul. They call him a brilliant but money-obsessed opportunist who has made his fortune by always being in the right place at the right time. They view Sun as a man looking for ways around rules and seeking to gain access to power. He has sought to do so again with the Trump administration.
The Observer
sent Sun requests for comment via email, Telegram and LinkedIn regarding the claims in this article. He did not respond.
Sun’s infatuation with Donald Trump began when he was in secondary school. He told
Forbes
that, as a teenager in Huizhou in China, he downloaded hundreds of episodes of
The Apprentice
on BitTorrent – a file-sharing platform he would later acquire – to help improve his English.
The reality show, hosted by Trump for 14 seasons, which saw contestants battle through business challenges, left a lasting impression on him. As China embraced market reforms and a new wave of consumerism in the early 00s,
The Apprentice
offered a seductive model of ambition, self-branding and western capitalist success.
After graduating from Peking University, Sun moved to the US in 2011 to pursue a master’s degree. There he discovered bitcoin, spending night and day on crypto forums and becoming excited by the concept of digital currency as “money for the future”.
His growing expertise led to a position at the crypto company Ripple Labs (now Ripple), advising on its expansion into China. Around the same time, in 2013, Sun founded the dating app Peiwo, a cross between Tinder and a chatroom, where users could send each other voice notes. The app drew millions of people, but faced scrutiny from Chinese authorities when they began uploading sexually explicit audio.
Peiwo was eventually shut down by regulators for hosting content that “disrupts socialist values”, but by that point Sun had already made his millions. In 2017, he founded Tron and a year later he acquired BitTorrent for about $140m. According to colleagues, Sun was by then a flamboyant millionaire who liked to flaunt his wealth. He walked around the office in squeaky-clean Gucci trainers and, according to a report from the Verge website, employees were baffled to see piles of cash pile up on the desk in his glass-walled office.
‘The government that should be regulating crypto is being led by a president with financial ties to it’
“ He’s not a very technical person,” said one former colleague. Instead, like Trump, Sun’s gift was showmanship. He built his crypto empire mostly by imitating the business strategies of other first movers and presenting them as innovative. A Tron white paper published in 2018 contained entire sections copied from other decentralised crypto projects, published without credit. Sun blamed poor translation from Chinese.At Tron and BitTorrent, employees faced demanding conditions. In 2020, two former Tron employees filed a civil lawsuit against Sun, with allegations ranging from fraud to verbal and physical harassment. A separate lawsuit made similar allegations in 2021. On one occasion, a witness recalled seeing Sun allegedly strike a member of his engineering team.
The following year, Sun stepped down as chief executive of Tron to become ambassador and permanent representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization. The details of his ambassadorship have not been made public; reports speculate that Sun paid to become a permanent citizen of the Caribbean nation. (Sun has also reportedly paid for, or attempted to pay for, citizenship in St Kitts and Nevis and Malta). According to legal documents seen by
The Observer
, Sun tried to get out of at least one lawsuit by claiming diplomatic immunity. The cases were heard in private and eventually settled. In 2022, the Verge reported that the US justice department had opened a probe into whether Sun had committed a number of crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the US. No filings followed and, in April of this year, the Trump administration ordered prosecutors to limit their pursuit of cryptocurrency crimes. Sun has always denied any wrongdoing.
In the 2023 case that was shelved in February, the
US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Sun
and related entities, including the Tron Foundation and the BitTorrent Foundation, with fraud.
The civil lawsuit alleged they had sold crypto tokens as unregistered securities, manipulated their markets through wash trading and paid celebrities – including Lindsay Lohan, Soulja Boy and Jake Paul – to promote tokens without disclosure.
“It was one of the most flagrant set of allegations that the SEC made against a crypto market participant,” said Amanda Fischer, who was senior counsellor to the chair of the SEC during this period. At the time, Sun said the lawsuit “lack[ed] merit”, but he quietly stepped down from his ambassador position as a result of the investigation. Sources say he still demands that people refer to him as “his excellency”. At the time, Sun said the lawsuit “lacked merit”.
If the lawsuits and investigations knocked Sun, he did not let it show. In November, before the SEC case was shelved, the billionaire went viral when he
purchased a banana duct‑taped to a wall for $6.2m
and later ate it. In the past year he has attended galas and graced the cover of
Forbes
, and is due to travel to space with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company next month.
Sun’s businesses, too, remain largely untouched. In 2024, Tron hosted 58% of all illicit crypto activity – more than any other blockchain. Sun has previously said “criminals are drawn to the same features that make blockchain revolutionary – speed, efficiency, and borderless transactions”, and that Tron’s “transparency actually makes it harder, not easier, to launder money”.
Tron will go public in the US in a reverse merger that allows Sun to bypass the detailed disclosures and regulations required in a traditional IPO. There is no evidence of wrongdoing when it comes to the Tron deal, but Painter, the former White House ethicist, said he believes the SEC should be carefully monitoring it.
Fischer, a former employee of the regulator, is doubtful that it will. “ I, frankly, don’t know why the public would have trust in the agency any more to enforce the law without political favour,” she said.
“It’s flagrant that the commission alleged that the Tron token was an unregistered security that was illegally touted by celebrities that didn’t disclose they were being paid, that had wash trading, and now Justin Sun is endeavouring to create an exchange traded company that holds that very token, and that they’re seeking to have that trade on the Nasdaq in affiliation with the president’s family.
“I am almost at a loss for words,” Fischer added.
Photograph by Fan Kar-Long/Bloomberg via Getty Images
