This is only the most recent incident in which Justin Sun has used legal threats to try to shape media narratives around himself and his companies — BuzzFeed news in 2018, CoinGeek in 2023, CoinDesk in 2024.
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![In late 2024, Justin Sun and his team demanded crypto media outlet CoinDesk take down an article about Sun’s $6.2 million purchase of Comedian, a conceptual artwork appearing as a banana duct taped to a wall. Shortly after Sun purchased the artwork, he captured additional headlines by eating the banana at a press conference in Hong Kong.e According to the Wall Street Journal, Sun’s team had objected to the “tone” of the CoinDesk article, which described Sun’s desire for fame, then-ongoing SEC lawsuit, and legal threats against media outlets, and suggested that his headline-making art purchase could be an attempt to distract media attention from less flattering coverage. (As I noted in a past issue of Citation Needed, “The [banana] stunt was timed right around Sun's first WLFI token purchase, diverting some press attention from it.”) CoinDesk had just been acquired by the crypto exchange Bullish, and Bullish executives reportedly were the ones who ordered the article’s deletion. According to some CoinDesk employees, Bullish executives had been pressuring reporters to avoid critical coverage or negative opinion pieces about important sponsors of CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference, a major income stream for the struggling media outlet; Sun’s Tron was among them. Not long after the article was removed, CoinDesk fired its editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds and deputy editors-in-chief Nick Baker and Mark Hochstein. CoinDesk said the firings were part of a downsizing effort and unre](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/057/357/398/577/999/original/e137060860dd1055.png)
@molly0xfff one thought when reading this - why do all these billionaire man-children love companies with the letter x in them? Does it symbolise something unknown, or are they stuck in that moment of embarrassed teen excitement that x can stand for something naughty?
@m1ke it usually stands for "exchange". FTX was short for "Futures Exchange". HTX was supposedly named for "Huobi" (its former name) and Tron (Sun's other project), though the similarity didn't exactly go unnoticed
@molly0xfff wild how casually they discuss an $8m loss on a public platform
@molly0xfff I thought I didn't really need more reasons to avoid Justin Sun, but I was wrong. Thanks for all the detail.
@molly0xfff I always figured Binance would be the next to pop their own bubble. Oh well. Maybe this will speed them along
@molly0xfff
good reporting! this guy is a slimebag.
@molly0xfff
If Peter Thiel & Charles Koch can pay to scrub Google searches of their name to achieve a reputation rehab, why can't Justin Sun?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_effect
How else are they supposed to find more gullible marks?
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/08/peter-thiel-why-google-never-talks-about-search.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/books/review/the-contrarian-peter-thiel-max-chafkin.html
Self-erasure as a service
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/10/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet.html
Justin Sun has sued Bloomberg for publishing details about his wealth that he himself provided. While Sun claims the lawsuit stems from privacy concerns, Sun seems to be trying to suppress unflattering details about his wealth and business activities as he reinvents himself in the US.
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![Crypto billionaire Justin Sun has sued Bloomberg for publishing details about his wealth that he himself provided to qualify for their Billionaire Index. While Sun was initially eager for Bloomberg to publicize his multibillionaire status, he became furious when he learned they planned to publish a rough breakdown of the assets comprising his crypto fortune. This may be because it reveals an inconvenient detail: the majority of his assets are TRX, the cryptocurrency issued by his company Tron — and he owns most of the TRX in circulation (63%). This concentration is somewhat reminiscent of the 2022 revelation that Sam Bankman-Fried had built his crypto empire on a foundation of FTT, the token issued by his own company FTX, sparking concerns about the solvency of his businesses and the value of FTT that ended in the collapse of both.
Sun’s fury could also stem from Bloomberg’s reporting that Sun owns the HTX cryptocurrency exchange (renamed from Huobi in late 2023 [I40]). Though it has long been clear that Sun holds more control over the exchange than he claims to have as a mere adviser, he has refused to admit he owns the company. This is a pattern with Sun, who has also denied ownership of other companies with which he’s heavily involved, such as Poloniex (which he later acknowledged owning), BiT Global, and Techteryx.](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/057/341/564/911/302/original/91a014efb45c2c99.png)
@molly0xfff Didnt we put that guy in jail? I must have missed a chapter.
@darren not this particular crypto billionaire, no
According to Bloomberg, Sun owns 63% of the supply of the TRX token. His TRX holdings, even massively discounted by Bloomberg, represent 40% of his net worth. Another 30% is his ownership of the HTX cryptocurrency exchange — ownership he’s previously denied.
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Sun claims that Bloomberg violated a confidentiality agreement when they published estimates of his major crypto holdings. However, his own exhibits suggest Sun tried to retroactively impose extreme confidentiality terms a month after sharing the information.
The conversations between Sun and the journalists reflect eagerness to share information, followed by concern and then regret once it became evident that Sun would not be allowed to dictate the format or contents of Bloomberg’s reporting.
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![The exhibits
Telegram conversations and email exchanges attached as exhibits in Sun’s lawsuit appear to tell a somewhat different story than the one he laid out in the complaint.14b A message from a member of Sun’s team on February 28 indicates that a fellow employee named Timothy “will share with u the documents once get [sic] the approval from Justin ”. Several hours later, Timothy confirms he shared the material with Bloomberg journalist Dylan Sloan. Later that evening, Timothy asks about security policies to “prevent data leakage”, and Sloan describes cybersecurity practices and plans to analyze Sun’s crypto wealth using the Arkham cryptocurrency analysis platform. The subsequent week, on March 4, Sloan provides a more detailed plan for their Arkham analysis and outlines that they use a custom API. He assures them that “the file of Justin’s wallet addresses won’t leave our office”. “Are you all OK with that plan as it relates to data security?” he asks. Timothy responds, “ok, [no problem]”; Sun himself also responds “Ok”.
Then, on March 27, Sun suddenly posts what looks like several paragraphs of a confidentiality agreement in the Telegram chat — a month after his team had already shared his financial information.](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/057/349/298/133/982/original/148a68bf1856f401.png)
@molly0xfff It’s weird how he was so eager for people to know that he’s rich, but didn’t want them to know how. And there also seems to be a surprising naïveté wrt the press.
By the time Sun filed his lawsuit, Bloomberg had already published the Billionaires Index entry. Sun has withdrawn the motion for a TRO and injunction, claiming he is “engaged in discussions” with Bloomberg to correct errors, though corrections seem minimal thus far.
This is only the most recent incident in which Justin Sun has used legal threats to try to shape media narratives around himself and his companies — BuzzFeed news in 2018, CoinGeek in 2023, CoinDesk in 2024.
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@molly0xfff I'm reading all of this and my brains just go "this 'wealth' just simply does not actually exist, right? RIGHT???"
Sun’s legal threats mirror the strategy of his new business partner and ally, President Trump. Sun has spent approximately $213 million on Trump-related businesses, earning an advisory position at Trump’s World Liberty Financial.
Sun’s business and legal future in America brightened after the payments began, with the February pause of an ongoing SEC lawsuit against him and his companies alleging unregistered securities sales and fraud. He no longer seems concerned about a criminal investigation.
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![The Trump connection
Sun’s aggressive attempts to fend off critical media coverage mirror the litigation playbook of his latest business partner and ally. Barred from donating to political campaigns because he is not a US citizen, Sun has nevertheless joined the deep-pocketed crypto pack in buying favor with President Trump, out-splurging any other single crypto donor by funneling $213 million toward Trump’s crypto businesses. It began in November 2024 with his $30 million purchase of $WLFI, which earned him an advisory position with the token’s issuer, the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. He bought more in January, bringing his total investment in the project to $75 million.f He would go on to top the leaderboard at Trump’s controversial pay-for-access memecoin dinner in May by outspending other attendees on $TRUMP,g and in July he announced plans to pour another $100 million into that token [I88].](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/057/362/864/714/236/original/b9860121953b7356.png)
![Sun’s business and legal future in America brightened substantially after the payments began, with the February pause of an ongoing SEC lawsuit against him and his company that had alleged not only unregistered securities sales, but that he had personally directed a wash trading scheme to inflate the price of Tron’s TRX token — a token that we now know forms the majority of his personal wealth. Sun, reportedly once so afraid of a possible warrant for his arrest that he spent years refusing to step foot in the United States and even forfeited a $28 million trip to space in 2021,5 has evidently had those fears assuaged, posting photos of himself touring the White House (at Trump’s personal invitation, he says).20 He also cashed in on the spaceflight opportunity, spending 10 minutes in sub-orbit on an August Blue Origin flight.
[Image: Justin Sun holds a photograph of himself as a child as he sits in a spacecraft with the Earth visible in the background]
(via Justin Sun)
In June, Sun announced he would be taking Tron public in the US through a reverse merger with a company that previously sold theme park merchandise. The deal was brokered by Dominari Securities, a small investment firm that had added Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr to its advisory board in February [I86].](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/057/363/542/405/651/original/9a1888ce2da46b4b.png)
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