727 FinanceJustin Sun describes his "Buffett, Musk, Trump" hybrid approach, responds to the WLFI lawsuit and emotional disputes, and discloses AI participation in major decision-making and a public bet to lower body fat to below 18% within one year.
Podcast: William Joy
Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews
Introduction: This episode of "The Golden Age" is the second half of the conversation between Jin Ming and Justin Sun. After the previous episode (related reading: Conversation with Justin Sun: In the AI Golden Age, How Can Ordinary People Place Their Bets?) discussed investment positions and market judgments, this episode goes further into Justin Sun's personal growth path, covering topics such as investment philosophy, business communication, litigation disputes related to Trump, personal emotional disputes, AI participation in major decisions, and physical management and long-term health. Justin Sun summarizes his growth method as integrating the characteristics of three people: Buffett, Musk, and Trump: from Buffett he learns value investing and risk control, from Musk he understands technological innovation and growth narratives, and from Trump he learns personal branding and communication methods.
In addressing controversies, regarding the litigation related to World Liberty Financial, Justin Sun emphasized that there is no contradiction between investors safeguarding their rights in accordance with the law and supporting U.S. digital currency policy. Speaking of personal emotional disputes and his identity as a public figure, he explained the complex relationship between legal proceedings and personal expression.
In addition, Justin Sun revealed that he is trying to introduce AI into major life decisions. In terms of health management, he proposed a data-driven long-term plan to optimize his physical condition through AI, smart devices, precise diet records, and professional testing, and set a goal to reduce his body fat percentage to below 18% before October 9, 2027, promising to publicly submit to public verification at that time.
Buffett, Musk, and Trump: How to Form One's Own Investment and Life Playbook
Jin Ming: Do you have any role models in communication? For example, CZ, or other people you relatively approve of? How do you view the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your communications team?
Justin Sun: I don't think this should be called "emulating." If we look at the whole playbook of life, I am a "hybrid" of three people: Musk, Trump, and Buffett!
Jin Ming: Sorry, I can't help laughing. The three of them combined became Justin Sun?
Justin Sun: Right! Coincidentally, all three of them are my alumni at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). People used to joke that Penn had a "Big Three," and later, as I integrated the playbooks of all three into one, people joked that a "fourth giant" was gradually emerging, namely Justin Sun.
Actually, life is often a matter of chance. In 2011, when I applied to American universities, I applied to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, UCLA, and Penn. Harvard and Yale did not want me at all and rejected me outright; Stanford and Penn both offered admission. Yet I chose Penn. You should know that when I applied in 2011, Penn was not yet regarded by everyone as the top Tier 1. In recent years, with the rise of the Big Three, Penn has begun to feel that "I can do it too." At that time, apart from Buffett, Musk's Tesla had a market value of only about $2 billion, and everyone was still on the path of growth.
Jin Ming: But Buffett does not do communication at all in his daily life. From whom exactly did you learn your communication habits and abilities? Mainly from Trump?
Justin Sun: What I mean is actually not just communication, but my entire life map and playbook:
First, in investment and risk control, I learned from Buffett and Munger. I have fully absorbed their value investing approach that values fundamentals. This theory is like the kung fu of Zhang Sanfeng and Chongyang Zhenren in Wudang: very solid and focused on the foundation. Coincidentally, Buffett, Munger, and other "old-timers" are unwilling to touch the "new-timer" field of crypto, so I directly take Buffett's playbook and use it to compete with the "new-timers," achieving a dimensionality reduction attack and gaining an extremely strong advantage.
Second, Buffett has shortcomings, which Musk made up for. Buffett's era was entirely about "picking up cigar butts," looking at valuations, and seeing when price-to-earnings ratios could recover real money; but after the high-tech revolution, today's financial markets have changed and are driven by "tech narratives" and expectations. Musk filled in the part about "how to judge high-tech, high-growth" opportunities. Although I did not go into cars (I explained in a previous interview why I did not), Buffett's fundamental risk control plus Musk's tech narrative have become my two-wheel drive. How to allocate among the past, present, and future is very critical.
Third, in personal IP and communication, I mainly learned from Trump, and partly from Musk as well. I knew about Trump very early, as early as elementary school. At that time, he hosted the reality show "The Apprentice," descending by helicopter with two teams to compete in business battles. I watched every season without missing one, and I even learned my spoken English by following this show.
These three people actually also have a "law of mutual disdain." And as a younger generation, I completely integrated and absorbed all three of them.
Jin Ming: Haha, you can't even find such a person in Jin Yong's martial arts novels, absorbing Guo Jing, Linghu Chong, and Zhang Wuji all into one person. Too interesting.
Justin Sun: Let me give you a detail, and you will know how much they disdain each other. When I won the bid for lunch with Buffett and ate with him, I strongly recommended one thing to him: I said you could acquire Musk's Tesla. At that time, Tesla's market value had fallen to a trough, and Musk was bent on taking Tesla private and selling it. He badly needed a heavyweight figure like Buffett to endorse it, and the price was very cheap.
Jin Ming: But Buffett's investment style would absolutely not allow him to buy Tesla. He would not even invest in it, let alone acquire it.
Justin Sun: You are absolutely right! If he had bought it, he would not be Buffett. Buffett told me a logic to my face at the time. He said: "Do you know why I have been able to live to this day? I never make heavy investments in companies that can give me 'surprises/accidents.' If I wake up tomorrow morning and the waiter brings a newspaper, and the front-page headline is a company I invested in, as long as I can imagine such an uncontrollable scenario in my mind, I will absolutely not invest in it."
Jin Ming: He cannot accept such disruptive and drastic changes. That is completely contrary to his investment style.
Justin Sun: More than contrary. In our words, with such huge ups and downs, seeing it might cause a cerebral hemorrhage and you could be gone in an instant, because the changes are really too fast and too large.
Jin Ming: Speaking of these three giants, you are currently in litigation with one of them, Trump's WLFI (World Liberty Financial). Your business has a great deal of intersection with the United States. At this critical moment, suing his interest-related party, do you not consider personal relationships and not worry about hidden risks and troubles later?
Justin Sun: First, let me state one thing: I still firmly support President Trump's crypto policy. I think his digital currency policy and AI strategy are both very successful.
The reason we sued World Liberty Financial is entirely normal commercial investor behavior. We invested in them, but they have problems such as insufficient investment transparency, inadequate disclosure of information to investors, and even suspected fraud. We filed the lawsuit through formal judicial channels in the California federal court, and ultimately a federal judge will decide. This is fully consistent with the operation of the U.S. rule-of-law system.
This will not affect our judgment on other major trends at all:
I personally remain continuously heavily invested in U.S. technology stocks;
Last month, TRX's U.S. spot ETF was officially approved, and we also completed our ecosystem's second bell-ringing in the U.S. stock market on Cboe;
Our U.S. stock business is also undergoing large-scale "on-chain" migration;
Our judgment that the dollar will strengthen and the AI industry will continue to be strong remains completely unchanged.
Domestic public opinion has exaggerated and overcomplicated this lawsuit. In fact, it is just a lawsuit where business is business.
Jin Ming: I remember you invested $40 million at the time? Now even if you win the lawsuit and return the tokens to sell them, I estimate they would be worth at most three to five million dollars, because the price has fallen too miserably.
Justin Sun: Yes, the price has indeed fallen a lot. But the amount we are seeking in the lawsuit will not be only that low. It is not simply returning tokens and refunding money. Based on the amount under the agreement at the time, it could be $400 to $500 million.
But then again, even $400 to $500 million is not a matter of vital damage within our overall asset portfolio. We invest like old hunters, very patiently. Once we are completely optimistic, very confident, and about to make an extremely major decision, we will invest at least $4 to $5 billion in a single deal or more. That is what counts as our large position.
Jin Ming: Let's talk about the matter that caused a huge uproar online some time ago. Everyone was discussing whether you were trying to get back the bride price at the time. Apart from money, why did you insist on making such a private emotional dispute public on the internet?
Justin Sun: All right, I'll talk about this, and I won't mention names. After that article was published, I did not accept any interviews. That long article already said everything I should say. But I can talk about the real background at the time:First, both she and I are public figures. At the time, I had already made up my mind to pursue legal action against her. In the United States, as soon as a complaint is filed, the court information is publicly available online, the media will immediately report on it in full, and everyone will come running to question me about what exactly is going on. So I simply did not have the option of "keeping it hidden and not saying anything." Rather than waiting for the court to make it public and then having others spread rumors, I could only pick a point in time, before the court spoke, to tell the whole story from my own perspective.
Second, even an upright official finds it hard to settle family disputes—that has been true for five thousand years. The grievances and resentments between two people are very difficult for any outsider, or even the parties themselves, to sort out clearly, so when I published that article, I never expected others to fully understand it.
In my entire long article, I did not mention the name of a single third person in real life; I used pronouns throughout.
There may have been hundreds of millions of things between us, and I selected only the 5 most representative ones to discuss.
Some people accused me of "exposing privacy." I disagree. In a romantic relationship, as long as two people open their mouths and talk about anything, it is essentially privacy. What I faced at the time was simply whether to speak and how to speak.
When I wrote it, I tried my best to detach myself and remain absolutely objective. People may feel, while watching the drama unfold, that I had many choices, but in reality, under that situation, my room for choice was far smaller than people imagine.
Jin Ming: You usually place extreme importance on ROI (return on investment) and risk control in business. Do you think this set of business logic holds in relationships?
Sun Yuchen: In the world of relationships, I admit that I am a complete "novice," and I do not have any definitive conclusion.
Actually, everyone later came to know that the decision to separate at that time was basically made for me by Claude. Many of the major decisions in my life now are made with Claude deeply involved. People may find this too ahead of its time, and some may even think I am shifting the blame to AI. But the fact is, for major matters, I am very inclined to listen to Claude's advice.
When a boy faces a "white moonlight," the destructive power is actually very great, and making this kind of clean break is extremely painful. To some extent, this was also a personal parting and transformation for me—I said goodbye to my past emotional cognition, and AI took over my decision-making system. I never wrote that article to seek sympathy or to seek people taking sides; it was purely to pour out, exactly as it was, the things I was confused about, could not figure out, and did not know were right or wrong.
Jin Ming: Then, regarding the public opinion impact that later fermented from this matter, do you feel that you let her down?
Sun Yuchen: It is very hard for me to define it with the three words "let her down." Since she left, there has been no direct contact between us at all. Later, after the article was published, some mutual friends contacted me, but I never contacted her even once. What is past is completely past.
Jin Ming: Later, public opinion reversed, and people instead sympathized with her, with most of the negative opinion falling on you. In a certain sense, your long article actually "helped" her. Was this reversal what you hoped to see?
Sun Yuchen: I had no preset expectations or inclinations regarding public opinion. If I had been trying to manipulate public opinion and reputation, I would never have written that article. I just wanted to express the confusion in my heart. In the end, things fermented into this shape, which was never a form I had envisioned in advance.
Jin Ming: We have known each other for eleven or twelve years. Looking back, if something could bring huge returns but might not be sufficiently respectable, you would often still choose to do it. Now that you are already very successful, if you encounter something in the future with "huge returns but not sufficiently respectable," will you still do it?
Sun Yuchen: When I think about problems now, I have actually moved beyond the dimensions of "returns" or "respectability." Claude and I discuss things, and after we align our understanding, as long as we believe that the matter is essentially "right," we will do it.
As for interests and so-called respectability, looking over a longer time axis, all of them will change. Back then, we invested in Bitcoin when it was only 1 yuan and it rose to 100,000 yuan, with far too many ups and downs in between; the same with investing in Tesla and investing in Nvidia—in 2015, Nvidia was still relying on graphics cards to mine Ethereum. Including having dinner with Buffett back then, the real and complex maneuvering behind it was something the public could see less than 1% of. My principle for conducting myself and doing things now is extremely simple: as long as at the moment of doing it, AI and I determine that it is right, we will do it, and I will fully accept whatever consequences arise afterward.
Jin Ming: When we met in Singapore last time, you were about 10 jin thinner than you are now. For the one or two weeks after that, we kept talking about exercising and having "thin muscle." Later you also started dating, and now girls generally like men with physical attractiveness and muscle definition, and you also know very well the importance of body management. But as someone with such strong execution ability, why has it not translated into body shape results for so long?
Sun Yuchen: I have reflected on it, mainly for two reasons:
At the time, although I recognized it verbally, its priority in my mind was not high enough. A person's execution follows priority; if the priority is not ranked at the very front, it will be delayed indefinitely.
And the most critical point—recently my understanding of "thin muscle" has undergone a complete fundamental qualitative change.
The reason I figured it out this time has nothing to do with physiological attraction between men and women; it is a complete realization of the decisive significance of muscle for health and quality of life in middle and old age.
On this matter, my cognition has finally broken through the superstition toward the "three giants" Musk, Trump, and Buffett:
Not only do all three of them completely avoid training muscle themselves, they even take pride in not working out.
Trump and Buffett drink full-sugar Coca-Cola by the mouthful in front of the whole world every day.
Brian Johnson, the guy in Silicon Valley doing extreme anti-aging experiments, previously posted two comparison photos: one with thin limbs and a fat belly (similar to me now and to Musk), and the other a recent photo after training lean muscle. As a result, Musk directly left a mocking comment underneath: "The fat version of you was more handsome and healthier."
I was deeply influenced by the three of them in the past, and deep down I felt that exercise was a matter for you professional athletes, and that ordinary rich people simply did not need it. But now I have completely sobered up: I train muscle so that when I am 80, my energy and body can still be as robust as at 30, so that I can continue to study AI at high intensity and discuss the world with Claude, rather than sitting in a wheelchair unable to even take care of basic daily life.
Jin Ming: That sounds very firm. So do you already have a schedule for implementation now?
Sun Yuchen: Not only do I have one, I have already built a complete "all-weather data tracking system," and it is fully up and running:
Extremely simple and strictly controlled diet: quit sugar, quit oil, quit salt, absolutely no sugary drinks or juice; high-protein diet, take dietary supplements. Photograph every meal and send it to AI, and AI helps me calculate calories and create a calorie deficit.
Hardware data closed loop: wear an Oura Ring on my hand to monitor physiological data in real time; keep a Withings professional body fat scale at home; regularly go to the hospital for precise DEXA bone density and body composition scans.
Regular resistance training: do 35 minutes of strength training every two days. Record training movements and send them to AI, while professional colleagues at the company assist with guidance. I do not insist on heavy bench presses and have no psychological burden at all.
This system has been running continuously for 20 days, I have trained 10 times, and my body fat percentage has genuinely dropped by a full 1%!
Jin Ming: By my visual estimate, your body fat is probably around 24% to 25% now? What is your one-year goal?
Sun Yuchen: You are very accurate! When I first started training, I was 26.8%, and right now at this moment I am 25.8%. My one-year goal is to get below 20%.
Jin Ming: 20% is still thick; that is called "fat-wrapped muscle," and the lines simply will not show. For a man to get true thin muscle, body fat must be brought to between 16% and 18%.
Sun Yuchen: The baseline goal I first set for myself and AI is below 20%. As long as I put in the effort, I do not rule out going directly to 18% or even lower.
Jin Ming: Can you really do it in a year? What if you cannot?
Sun Yuchen: I absolutely can do it. If I cannot, then one year from now I will directly post on the entire internet an unedited, non-AI-retouched, original-camera body photo of myself, and accept everyone's public scrutiny and public shaming.
Jin Ming: Good! We often travel for business and attend meetings, and our time is fragmented. Let me teach you the strongest bodyweight exercise selected by the 2024 Journal of Strength—the burpee:
"Do a push-up with your chest completely touching the ground, then push up and use both feet to explode upward into a jump. This movement trains the upper body with the push-up and the lower body with the jump, and between the rise and fall it powerfully activates the whole body's core muscle groups."
After meetings or interviews, whenever you can free up a bit of space, do 10 to 20 at a time, and squeeze in 1 to 2 sessions a day, and your whole-body strength and cardiorespiratory fitness will all be trained. You can even do it on rest days when you are not working out. As long as you persist every day, it will not take a year at all—in 3 to 6 months your physique will be completely transformed, and your body fat will drop straight to 16%.
Sun Yuchen: Great, I will immediately add this movement to my daily must-do list, and do it even on rest days. This time next year, you are welcome to personally inspect my thin muscle results.