In February of 2020, Warren Buffett had lunch with a major player in crypto. Justin Sun, owner of the file-sharing company BitTorrent and founder of the cryptocurrency Tron, won the eBay charity auction to have lunch with the famed investor with a $4.57 million bid. The money went to the GLIDE Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. In that lunch, Sun made the case for crypto to an ardent skeptic.
Sun looked to build on Buffett’s understanding of blockchain. In an open letter to the crypto community announcing that he had won the auction, Sun wrote that he was a long-term believer in Buffett’s long-term value investing strategy, going on to write that he thought that “the long-term value investing strategy and cryptocurrency, in [his] eyes, are one and the same,” and that the crypto community has a long road ahead to “educate the mainstream on blockchain’s value and proper use cases.”
He also noted that “even one of the most successful investors of all times can sometimes miss a coming wave.” And “Buffett has admitted he overpaid for big investment food giant Kraft Heinz Co., while failing to realize the potential of the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet, the parent of Google and even Apple.”3
