By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 19th, 2024
Justin Sun is quite optimistic of his meeting with Warren Buffett and is said to have invited some influential figures from the crypto space to communicate with Buffett the merits of blockchain and the opportunities that lie ahead.
A huge buzz has been there in the crypto community with Tron founder Justin Sun winning the bid for a ‘power lunch‘ with the investment guru Warren Buffet by paying a massive sum of $4.57 million. Although the entire sum raised will go for a charity cause, what interests the crypto community is whether Sun will be able to change Buffett’s opinion on crypto.
Warren Buffett has been one of the biggest critics of cryptocurrencies calling Bitcoin as ‘rat poison squared’. Winning the power lunch with the Oracle of Omaha, Sun would make an effort to bridge the gap between “the crypto community and the traditional investors”.
For this Sun has moved the venue of his power lunch in the heartland of tech namely the Silicon Valley, San Francisco:
The 20th annual @eBay #PowerOfOneLunch with @WarrenBuffett will take place July 25 in #SanFrancisco! We decided to move this year’s lunch to a restaurant in the Bay Area to further shine the spotlight on @GLIDEsf's amazing charitable efforts! More details coming soon!
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) June 12, 2019
The Glide Foundation was started by Buffett’s late wife Susan and is a charity platform which offers help to the victims of domestic violence as well as offers meals to the homeless.
The Motive Behind the Power Lunch
Speaking to Yahoo Finance on Monday, June 10, Sun said that the major focus of the meeting is to bring traditional investors and the crypto community together. Sun said he is a believer and follower of Buffett’s value investment strategy and has also made money using them, in the past. Sun added:
“It might be unrealistic to convince Warren Buffett, just in three hours, to buy cryptocurrencies. But we want to show him the recent progress of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It’s not only about Tron itself, it’s about crypto and blockchain, the whole industry.”
Sun states that the money for the power lunch is what he has earned through the ad revenues from Tron’s file streaming service BitTorrent. Sun has pledged an additional donation of $100,000 to the Glide Foundation.
Despite Buffett’s hostility for crypto, the investment guru told Bloomberg:
“I’m delighted with the fact that Justin has won the lunch and am looking forward to meeting him and his friends.”
It would be interesting to see how the meeting between the two giants representing different facets of the financial industry, turn out to be. Sun is quite optimistic of this meeting as he said that “Investment opportunities are best when lots of people are underestimating the technology.”
However, Justin Sun doesn’t want to be the sole ambassador of the crypto industry and thus he has invited some of the prominent players like Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, and Litecoin’s Charlie Lee.
But it looks like Changpeng Zhao will be skipping this lunch for reasons undisclosed. One assumption is that Zhao has some hostility for Buffett was his sharp attacks on crypto in the past.