Justin Sun, founder of Tron and chief executive officer of BitTorrent Inc, in Hong Kong, China, on 10 February 2021. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Justin Sun, founder of Tron and chief executive officer of BitTorrent Inc, in Hong Kong, China, on 10 February 2021. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Cryptocurrencies Trump made $1.4bn from crypto in one year. Is Justin Sun the man who helped him do it? The entrepreneur is known in Washington as the financial power behind the president’s crypto fortune. How did Sun’s business love-in with the Trump family spiral into dueling lawsuits?
The most infamous financial scandal in US presidential history – the 1920s Teapot Dome affair – involved then president Warren G Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, taking roughly $400,000 in bribes. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $6m today. Last year, Donald Trump made at least $2.2bn ; his single year of income is on the order of 200 to 300 times larger than the bribe that defined “presidential corruption” in the American imagination for a century.
It’s taken for granted that Trump flogs items like Bibles and gold sneakers as a way to wring more money from his loyal base. But of the president’s $2.2bn, at least $1.4bn came from his crypto businesses. That’s an extraordinary achievement, even for an unscrupulous sitting president. How exactly did he do it without any prior background in crypto?
Many believe the answer is that he had help from a Chinese crypto billionaire called Justin Sun.
If crypto wants to succeed, we need to break the boundaries between traditional finance and the crypto world Justin Sun Sun is perhaps most famous for buying an artwork called Comedian – consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall – for more than $6m, and then eating it . But the maverick entrepreneur, who refers to himself as “Crypto’s billionaire barker”, is better known in Washington as the real financial power behind the Trump family’s crypto fortune – investing nearly $200m of his own fortune into Trump’s digital asset ventures.
Recently, Sun and the Trumps’ crypto love-in has curdled into dueling lawsuits – with Sun accusing Trump’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, of illegally freezing his assets, and World Liberty countersuing him for defamation.
Read more I’m a documentary film-maker and over the past year I’ve been making a film for the BBC about the next generation of billionaires. That means I got to talk to Sun during and after this fortune-and-fallout saga with the Trumps in multiple interviews. The story of their financial entanglement raises concerning questions about Trump’s cozy relationship to the crypto industry.
Born in Qinghai in north-western China, Sun has made billions from crypto. His first big win came in 2017 with his crypto coin called TRX, which he offered on his Tron blockchain, a global, decentralized software network on which people can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. He told me it was supposed to be like “using blockchain technology to send money like you send emails on the internet”.
It was also an appealing platform for criminals and terrorists to store their money. “The marquee names are Hezbollah and Hamas,” said Chris Harland-Dunaway, the Verge’s investigative journalist who reported on much of Sun’s crypto dealing , “but North Korean hackers also are active users on the Tron blockchain.” Some estimate that in some years almost half of all illicit crypto transactions (such as cr...