Author: Lin Wanwan, Rhythm
Most people in China first became aware of Justin Sun through his bizarre stories.
He invited Buffett to dinner for $30 million, but canceled at the last minute with a kidney stone; he bought a banana made of duct tape for $6.2 million and ate it in front of everyone at the press conference; he spent $75 million to become the largest financier of the Trump family's encryption project and sat in a seat at the White House dinner; at the age of 35, he flew across the Carmen Line and proclaimed himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.
The negative aspects are numerous. In 2023, it was sued by the SEC for market manipulation, with allegations including more than 600,000 wash trades to inflate the price of TRX and hiring celebrities to promote the product without disclosing their compensation. Currently, it is suing WLFI, a project related to the Trump family.
These rumors have spread so widely that they've almost overshadowed a serious matter: this man has almost never missed betting on any trend in the secondary capital markets over the past decade.
Starting in 2013, I began buying BTC. In 2016, I recommended that those born in the 1990s not buy houses, but instead buy:
Bitcoin, Nvidia, Tesla, Tencent.
Ten years have passed. As of May 2026, Tesla's total return was approximately 2683%, and Nvidia's total return was nearly 24000%.
If you had listened to Brother Sun back then and invested 10,000 yuan in Nvidia, it would be worth 2.4 million yuan today; if you had invested 10,000 yuan in Tesla, it would be worth 278,000 yuan today. A listener who bet 200,000 yuan on each of those stocks according to that list in 2016 would have had their Nvidia bet alone become about 48 million yuan, and their Tesla bet become about 5.4 million yuan, for a total of over 53 million yuan.
And this man is still firing his gun to this day. On November 6, 2025, Sun Yuchen made a statement:
"Short-term chip shortage, long-term energy shortage, and perpetual storage shortage."
The capital market's reaction to this statement only reached fever pitch in 2026. SanDisk (SNDK), which was spun off from Western Digital, rose from a low of about $35 to $1,439 in one year, a maximum increase of nearly 50 times.
HBM memory production capacity has been fully booked by the three major manufacturers: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. It was sold out in 2026, and orders have been scheduled for 2027-2028.
While everyone was still chasing the storage concept with fervor, in early 2026, Justin Sun changed his tune again in a video.
The video was originally about looking ahead to 2026. In addition to health-related topics like adding health to the New Year's agenda, he also specifically set aside time to focus on young people: embodied intelligence, drones, space computing, and space exploration.
I have compiled Sun Yuchen's public statements on these four directions over the past two years. When we look at them together, each path has seen the initial emergence of its capital leader.
Who will be the next storage stock?
The first thing Sun Yuchen mentioned was embodied intelligence.
The concept of robots has been discussed by humankind for at least a century. The word "robot" was coined by Czech playwright Čapek in 1920, and industrial robotic arms have been in use since the 1980s; Honda's ASIMO could climb stairs more than twenty years ago. But the real bottleneck has always been the development of the "brain."
In the past two years, the entire industry has fully shifted to the VLA model, which stands for Vision-Language-Motion. In simpler terms, robots used to perform tasks based on code, but now they are starting to perform tasks based on the world around them.
Unitree Robotics shipped over 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, ranking first globally, and submitted its IPO application to the Science and Technology Innovation Board in March 2026. Galaxy General Robotics secured $300 million (approximately RMB 2.1 billion) in a new round of financing in December 2025, bringing its total financing to approximately $800 million, with a valuation of $3 billion (approximately RMB 21.1 billion), setting new records for both single-round and cumulative financing in the embodied intelligence sector.
Justin Sun said he's unlikely to actually build robots himself, but he has a knack for this narrative and the direction of capital flows. In a Bloomberg interview, he said, "In a market where 99% of people don't know what a wallet is, the cost of education must be factored into the business model."
This statement, whether used to explain stablecoins in 2018 or in 2026, still applies. 99% of Chinese people have never used a humanoid robot, but if that robot can cook, move boxes, and care for the elderly, the remaining 1% represents the next opportunity.
The second track he chose was drones.
Humanoid robots are still ramping up mass production, while drones have already moved into commercial applications. Drones are naturally suited for tasks AI excels at, from autonomous navigation and group collaboration to data collection. They don't need to walk; flying is actually simpler for them than for humanoid robots.
On the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield, swarms of AI-powered drones have largely taken over the role previously played by tank units, and Ukraine's annual drone production target has climbed to several million units. In rural China, DJI agricultural drones fly over rice paddies, each drone replacing the work of ten farm laborers. Meituan in Shenzhen has successfully implemented drone delivery, with orders delivered in under 15 minutes.
Drones have outpaced humanoid robots. They represent the first commercially viable application of AI in the physical world.
Justin Sun's third area of focus was spatial computing. This was the least mainstream of the areas he explored.
When Apple released the Vision Pro in 2024, most people assumed it was a VR headset that cost several times more. This is likely a misinterpretation.
Vision Pro's ambitions have little to do with VR. It's Apple's first attempt to enable AI to understand space: how big is your living room, how far is the table from you, is the coffee cup to the left or right of the sofa, and can you reach it? This sounds simple, but it's ten times harder to do than training ChatGPT. Large language models only need to understand language, while spatial computation requires understanding physics.
This is precisely the common premise of robots, drones, and autonomous driving; they all require a kind of spatial intelligence. Nvidia's Cosmos platform, Google's Genie 3 world model, and Tesla's FSD are all doing the same thing: enabling AI to transition from understanding text to understanding the world.
ChatGPT only needs to understand language, but the next generation of AI needs to understand the world itself.
Sun Yuchen only verbally mentioned the first three tracks, but when it came to space, he actually went there in person.
On August 3, 2025, he sat in the cabin of Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-34 and flew over the Kármán line.
After returning to Earth, he expressed an ambition to transform his company from a mere "cryptocurrency exchange" into an "infrastructure service provider for the space economy," using blockchain to solve issues such as space asset ownership, satellite data trading, and interplanetary payments. It sounds like science fiction. But if you look back at how he preached USDT ten years ago, people back then also thought it was science fiction.
When he landed on Earth, he put it more directly to the young people: "Space exploration is a common mission for all mankind. I hope that through this flight, more young people will be inspired to devote themselves to science and technology and innovation, and jointly shape the interstellar future of mankind."
Sun Ge's investment logic
Justin Sun's publicly stated investment logic is: find a track with a clear direction, deploy at both ends simultaneously, and do not gamble on the execution capabilities of a single company.
The robot storyline is framed by separating the body and brain.
Tesla is betting heavily on its future, announcing in early 2026 that it will discontinue production of the Model S and Model X and convert its Fremont factory into the Optimus production line, aiming to produce one million units per year with a mass-produced unit price of approximately $20,000 to $25,000. The current version of the Optimus is already being used for parts handling and sorting at the Austin and Fremont factories, and the Gen 3 production line will start operating in the summer of 2026.
Nvidia is betting on the brain. Jetson Thor packs server-grade AI inference into the robot body, the Isaac GR00T has almost become the industry standard base, and Jensen Huang announced at GTC that there will be 1 billion humanoid robots worldwide by 2035.
Whether Optimus can deliver on its promises is Musk's problem, not Nvidia's. As long as the track is clear, the toll will still be collected.
The core judgment regarding drones is the irreversible nature of Physical AI in military scenarios.
AeroVironment's Switchblade loitering munition has become a signature weapon in Ukraine, with monthly production capacity increasing from 40 units to 500 units and a target of 1,200 units. A $3.9 billion order has locked in revenue for the next three years. Kratos' XQ-58 Valkyrie is the F-35's "loyal wingman," with manned aircraft handling missions and unmanned aircraft running flank missions. Its unit price is less than a fraction of that of a fifth-generation fighter jet, and it is projected to increase by 280% in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.
One side makes tanks uneconomical, while the other side makes manned fighter jets redundant; the logic of both sides complements each other.
On the space route, Justin Sun purchased a flight seat at Blue Origin for $28 million in 2021, donating the money to Blue Origin's STEM Foundation, which is distributed to 19 non-profit organizations. On August 3, 2025, he completed his suborbital flight aboard the New Shepard NS-34 mission.
In the public market, SpaceX filed a confidential IPO draft with the SEC in April 2026, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would become the largest IPO in human history; Rocket Lab's revenue exceeded $200 million in Q1 2026, making it the most direct alternative if SpaceX cannot be purchased.
Once SpaceX goes public, the pricing paradigm for the entire space sector will have to be rewritten.
You should listen to what Brother Sun says.
Looking at Sun Yuchen's statements over the past two years, his assessment of embodied intelligence is that "AI, robots, and blockchain have reached the iPhone era." His prediction of autonomous weaponized AI is "robot armies and robot police." His bet on the next generation of human-computer interfaces is "the fusion of AI, robots, and spatial computing." His perspective shift after crossing the Kármán line is, "The Earth is too small; it's our home."
These four things, when put together, form the complete picture of physical AI.
Over the past two decades, the internet has transformed the way information flows. WeChat replaced letter writing, Taobao replaced online marketplaces, and TikTok replaced television.
But the underlying rules of the physical world remain unchanged; workers are still workers, and factories are still factories.
In the next twenty years, AI may change the way the real world operates. Humanoid robots that don't need rest will stand in factories, self-driving cars will run on the roads, swarms of drones will roar on the battlefield, and the first "residents" to land on the moon and Mars will likely be the first AI robots.
The young man who told everyone not to buy a house in 2016 has now crossed the Carmen line.
Most of us are probably still waiting for the next Yanjiao.
