Last week, crypto billionaire Justin Sun announced on X that he was purchasing $100 million worth of President Donald Trump‘s memecoin, $TRUMP, which will soon be tradeable on TRON, the blockchain Sun founded in 2017.
“This move highlights our belief in collaborating across ecosystems to grow the crypto landscape with communities such as @GetTrumpMemes,” Sun wrote, before adding, “$TRUMP on #TRON is the currency of #MAGA!”
It’s just the latest headline-grabbing purchase for Sun, who made waves in the art world for purchasing Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the famed duct-taped banana—at Sotheby’s in December for $6.2 million. (He later ate the banana.) Then, in April, a New York Times investigation into World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by a Trump family corporate entity, revealed that Sun had spent $75 million on $WLFI coins.
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Sun has also been embroiled in legal turmoil over an entirely different purchase. In February, Sun sued billionaire art collector and music mogul David Geffen over the Alberto Giacometti sculpture Le Nez (1949–65), which Sun has said he bought in a private deal. Geffen countersued, claiming that the work was stolen from his collection by an employee and fraudulently sold. Sun has called for Geffen to hand over the sculpture.
Trump and company launched $TRUMP just days before his second inauguration in January, with the coin’s value skyrocketing over 300 percent in days. By March, the value of the coin had plummeted, with investors losing approximately $12 million. As ARTnews wrote upon the $TRUMP launch, meme coins, which are often labeled as “artworks” to skirt securities regulations, often collapse as quickly as they rise in value.
Still $TRUMP seemed to stablize with a market cap of $1.85 billion as of press time—a far cry from its inauguration peak of over $9 billion, and later peaks of $4.29 billion in February and $3.1 billion in late April.
However, ethics watchdogs have repeatedly argued that Trump’s ownership of $TRUMP has given the president an unprecedented method of facilitating graft and corruption. Most critcized was a May 22 dinner and White House tour that Trump gave to leading buyers of $TRUMP—Sun was an attendee—which spurred $148 million in purchases of the coin, according to the Guardian.
“Self-enrichment is exactly what the founders feared most in a leader—that’s why they put two separate prohibitions on self-benefit into the constitution,” former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told the Guardian last month. “Trump’s profiting from his presidential memecoin is a textbook example of what the framers wanted to avoid.”
“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, also told the Guardian.
As for what Sun might actually be trying to buy with his $TRUMP investments, CNBC has a rundown of the billionaire’s crypto-entanglements with the current president.