A Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur is set to have lunch with Warren Buffett after making the winning $4.57 million bid at a annual charity auction.
Businessman Justin Sun, the 28-year-old founder of the cryptocurrency firm Tronix and CEO of peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent, made his record-setting final bid of $4,567,888 at the 20th annual charity auction for a “Power Lunch with Warren Buffett.”
“I officially announce I’ve won the record-setting 20th-anniversary charity lunch hosted by Warren Buffett. I’ll also invite #blockchain industry leaders to meet with a titan of investment. I hope this benefits everyone,” Sun wrote on Twitter on Monday.
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The lunch, presented by eBay and the Glide Foundation, will be held at the famed Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in New York City. Sun will be able to invite up to seven other people to the lunch with Buffett, who is a known critic of cryptocurrencies.
While Buffett has been nicknamed “Oracle of Omaha” and predicted that cryptocurrencies will “come to a bad ending,” he has stated that he is looking forward to the meal.
“I’m delighted with the fact that Justin has won the lunch and am looking forward to meeting him and his friends. We are going to have a good time and Glide will use his contribution to help many thousands of people,” Buffett said in a statement released to the press.
“I’m a long-term believer (and certainly a big fan) of Buffett and his long-term value investing strategy,” wrote Sun in a Medium post.
“As some of you might know, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has said publicly he sees no ‘unique value’ in Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Yet, he has pointed to the potential in blockchain, the underlying technology behind all cryptocurrency. I look at the upcoming lunch with Buffett as an opportunity to seek mutual understanding and growth.”
Tronix, launched by Sun in 2017, is now valued at $2.56 billion and is the 10th largest cryptocurrency company in the world.
Featured image via Getty and Twitter / justinsuntron (right)
