Sun was born in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province in western China, in July 1990. He went to Peking University then the University of Pennsylvania, according to the Business Insider website. As a young businessman back in China he attended Hupan University, the elite business school founded by Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce company Alibaba.
Sun is said to have been personally recruited to what some people call the Chinese Harvard by Ma, who’d spotted his potential as an entrepreneur. Sun’s thesis was the pithily titled The Birth of a Decentralised Internet. In an interview at the time of his graduation, Sun drew a comparison between his business endeavours and Hupan’s values of “improving society with moral integrity”.
However, controversy has dogged Sun. In 2022, website The Verge ran a lengthy investigation called “Tron founder Justin Sun and his many escapes”. The piece said the “brash and outspoken” Sun was a man “desperately thirsty for success, with seemingly limitless energy” (no need for bananas, then). He was also labelled a risk-taker. The website claimed that Sun launched a so-called Initial Coin Offering (ICO) – like a traditional Initial Public Offering for shares, but with cryptocurrency – just days before the Chinese government banned ICOs in 2017, a ban that Sun allegedly knew was coming. He then flew to San Francisco where he started spending his “newfound riches”, including on the then-ailing company BitTorrent (now called Rainberry).
In 2023, Sun was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who alleged that Sun and his companies engaged in fraudulent activities to inflate the price of certain tokens. Sun denies the charges and is challenging the SEC.
