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Tron’s Justin Sun (Finally) Gets $4.5M Dinner With Warren Buffett
Justin Sun finally had his $4.5 million charity dinner with Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett last month.
By Paddy Baker
Updated Sep 13, 2021, 12:15 p.m. Published Feb 6, 2020, 1:38 p.m.
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Justin Sun and Warren Buffett discussed cryptocurrencies over dinner, six months after Sun canceled the original event claiming he had kidney stones.
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The TRON Foundation announced Thursday that Sun met the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for dinner, at Buffett's suggestion, at a private country club in his home city of Omaha, Neb., on Jan. 23. Sun brought several guests including Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, eToro CEO Yoni Assia as well as the CFO of Huobi, Chris Lee, and head of the Binance Charity Foundation, Helen Hai.
In a statement after the dinner, Sun said it "was really an honor and I’m grateful for Mr. Buffett’s dinner, wisdom and vision."
He added that he would "take Mr. Buffett’s advice and guidance to make TRON a better ecosystem, business with all the partners in the blockchain space and beyond," though he did not provide specifics.
Buffett has auctioned off a dinner with himself every year since 2000, with participants' funds directed toward charity. Sun placed a record-breaking $4.5 million bid at the Glide Foundation last year.
While his dinner had been originally scheduled for late July 2019, Sun postponed days before, claiming to have fallen ill with kidney stones.
A Chinese media outlet reported the day after the dinner's postponement that Sun was under investigation by local authorities and was not allowed to leave China, though Sun later appeared to be in San Francisco in a video live stream.
He later apologized for "over-marketing" the dinner, claiming it had had "a negative influence" with regulators and the public.
Buffett has been highly skeptical of cryptocurrencies, once famously referring to bitcoin as "rat poison squared." Although TRON declined to comment on what was discussed over dinner, Sun had originally said he hoped the meal would “bridge the gap between institutional and traditional investors and the realm of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.”
During the dinner, Buffett reportedly said that he didn't see any value in bitcoin because he believed that only businesses created value, Assia told CoinDesk. He also said that Buffett believed bitcoin was not a store of value but a "store of fear" because investors buy it out of "fear of what happens in the short term if the markets crash."
"He [Buffett] thinks that blockchain technology has value but that none of the companies out there right now are using it correctly. The smartest people say it’s an important technology, just no one really uses it yet," Assia added.
Buffett's assistant did not immediately return a request for comment.
UPDATE (Feb. 7, 09:50 UTC): This article has been updated to include quotations from eToro CEO, Yoni Assia.
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