After 50x Returns on Storage, Justin Sun is Already Eyeing the Next Decade

Most people in China came to know Justin Sun through his bizarre stories.

Spending 30 million to have lunch with Buffett, only to stand him up at the last minute with a kidney stone; paying $6.2 million for a duct-taped banana and eating it in front of everyone at the press conference; dropping $75 million to become the largest backer of the Trump family's crypto project, securing a seat at a White House dinner; and at age 35, flying past the Kármán line, crowning himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.

There is no shortage of negative press either. In 2023, he was sued by the SEC for market manipulation, with charges including over 600,000 wash trades to inflate TRX prices and paying celebrities for undisclosed promotions. Currently, he is involved in mutual lawsuits with the Trump family-related project WLFI.

These stories have spread so widely that they have almost overshadowed a serious fact. Over the past decade in the secondary capital markets, this man has hardly missed a single major trend.

From buying BTC in early 2013 to 2016, he advised the post-90s generation not to buy houses, but to buy:

Bitcoin, Nvidia, Tesla, and Tencent.

Ten years have passed. As of May 2026, Tesla's total return is about 2,683%, and Nvidia's total return is nearly 24,000%.

If you had listened to Brother Sun back then and spent 10,000 RMB on Nvidia, it would be worth 2.4 million RMB today; 10,000 RMB on Tesla would be 278,000 RMB. A listener who bet 20,000 RMB on each item on that list in 2016 would have seen just the Nvidia stake turn into about 48 million RMB, and the Tesla stake into about 5.4 million RMB, totaling just over 53 million RMB.

And this man is still pulling the trigger today. On November 6, 2025, Justin Sun dropped a statement:

"Short-term chip shortage, long-term energy shortage, permanent storage shortage."

The capital market's reaction to this phrase didn't reach a frenzy until 2026. SanDisk (SNDK), spun off from Western Digital, surged from a low of about $35 to $1,439 in a year, a maximum gain of nearly 50 times.

HBM memory capacity from the three major original manufacturers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—is fully booked. 2026 production is completely sold out, with orders extending into 2027–2028.

While everyone was still chasing the storage concept frenzy, in early 2026, Justin Sun changed his tune in a video.

That video was originally about the outlook for 2026. Aside from adding health to his New Year's list—a more wellness-focused topic—he specifically set aside time to address young people about: embodied intelligence, drones, spatial computing, and space exploration.

The author collected Justin Sun's public statements on these four directions over the past two years. Looking at them together, initial capital market leaders have already emerged along each path.

Who is the next storage stock?

The first thing Justin Sun pointed out was embodied intelligence.

The concept of robots has been discussed by humans for at least a century. In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the word "Robot"; industrial robotic arms have been used since the 1980s; Honda's ASIMO could climb stairs over twenty years ago. But the real bottleneck has always been the brain.

In the past two years, the entire industry has fully pivoted to the VLA model—Vision-Language-Action. In plain terms, robots used to act on code; now, robots are starting to act by observing the world.

Unitree's humanoid robot shipments exceeded 5,500 units in 2025, ranking first globally, and it submitted an IPO application on the STAR Market in March 2026. Galaxy General secured a new round of financing of $300 million (about 2.1 billion RMB) in December 2025, with cumulative financing of about $800 million and a valuation of $3 billion (about 21.1 billion RMB), setting new records for both single-round and cumulative financing in the embodied intelligence track.

Justin Sun said he most likely won't build robots himself, but he has a nose for such narratives and the direction of capital flow. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said, "In a market where 99% of people don't know what a wallet is, education costs must be factored into the business model."

This explanation worked for stablecoins in 2018, and it applies equally well in 2026. 99% of Chinese people still haven't used an embodied intelligence robot, but as long as that robot can cook, carry boxes, and care for the elderly, the remaining 1% represents the next opportunity.

The second track he highlighted is drones.

While humanoid robots are still scaling up mass production, drones have taken the lead in commercial implementation. They are naturally suited for AI tasks, from autonomous navigation and swarm coordination to data collection. They don't need to walk; flying is actually simpler than navigating as a humanoid robot.

On the Russia-Ukraine battlefield, AI drone swarms have already taken over more than half the role of past tank divisions. Ukraine's annual drone production target has climbed to several million units. Over rice fields in rural China, DJI's agricultural drones fly, each replacing ten farmworkers. Meituan in Shenzhen has already made drone delivery work, with delivery times from order to arrival under 15 minutes.

Drones are ahead of humanoid robots. They are the first form where AI has successfully closed the commercial loop in the physical world.

The third point Justin Sun highlighted is spatial computing. This is the least mainstream of all the directions he mentioned.

When Apple released the Vision Pro in 2024, most people treated it as a VR headset that was several times more expensive. This might be a misreading.

The Vision Pro's ambition has nothing to do with VR. It is Apple's first attempt to let AI understand space: how big your living room is, how far the table is from you, whether the coffee cup is to the left or right of the sofa, and whether you can reach it if you extend your hand. This sounds simple, but it is ten times harder to execute than training ChatGPT. Large language models only need to understand language; spatial computing needs to understand physics.

This happens to be the common prerequisite for 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: transitioning AI 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 only talked about the first three tracks, but when it comes to space, he actually went there in person.

On August 3, 2025, he boarded Blue Origin's "New Shepard" NS-34 capsule and flew past the Kármán line.

After returning to the ground, he expressed an ambition: he hopes his company will no longer just be a "cryptocurrency exchange," but an "infrastructure service provider for the space economy," using blockchain to solve space asset rights confirmation, satellite data trading, and interplanetary payments. It sounds like science fiction. But looking back at how he preached USDT a decade ago, people thought that was science fiction too.

Bringing it back down to Earth, his message to young people was even more direct: "Space exploration is the common mission of all mankind. I hope this flight will inspire more young people to devote themselves to technology and innovation, and jointly shape humanity's interstellar future."

Brother Sun's Investment Logic

Justin Sun's publicly stated investment logic is: find tracks with a certain direction, place bets on both ends simultaneously, and don't gamble on the execution of a single company.

On the robot track, his framework is to bet on the body and the brain separately.

He bets on the body with Tesla. In early 2026, they announced the discontinuation of the Model S and Model X, converting the Fremont factory into an Optimus production line, targeting an annual output of one million units at a mass-production price of about $20,000 to $25,000; the current version of Optimus is already doing parts搬运 and sorting in the Austin and Fremont factories, with the Gen 3 production line starting in the summer of 2026.

He bets on the brain with Nvidia. Jetson Thor packs server-level AI inference into the robot body, and Isaac GR00T has practically become the industry's universal base. Jensen Huang declared at GTC that there will be 1 billion humanoid robots globally by 2035.

Whether Optimus delivers on time is Musk's problem, not Nvidia's. As long as the track succeeds, the toll will be collected.

On the drone track, the core judgment is the irreversibility of Physical AI in military scenarios.

AeroVironment's Switchblade loitering munition has become an iconic weapon in Ukraine. Monthly production capacity has increased from 40 to 500 units, targeting 1,200, and a $3.9 billion order backlog has locked in revenue for the next three years; Kratos' XQ-58 Valkyrie is the F-35's "loyal wingman"—manned aircraft go on missions while drones cover the flanks, at a unit price that is a fraction of a fifth-generation fighter. It rose 280% in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.

One makes tanks uneconomical; the other makes manned fighter jets redundant. The logic on both ends is complementary.

On the space track, Justin Sun bid $28 million for a Blue Origin flight seat in 2021. The money was donated to Blue Origin's STEM charity fund and distributed to 19 non-profit organizations. On August 3, 2025, he completed a suborbital flight aboard the New Shepard NS-34 mission.

In the public market, SpaceX submitted a confidential IPO draft to the SEC in April 2026, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in human history; Rocket Lab's Q1 2026 revenue exceeded $200 million, making it the most direct alternative when you can't buy SpaceX.

Once SpaceX goes public, the pricing coordinates of the entire space sector will have to be rewritten.

You Should Listen to Brother Sun

Stringing together Justin Sun's remarks over the past two years, "AI, robotics, and blockchain have reached their iPhone moment" is his judgment on embodied intelligence. "Robot armies, robot police" is his prophecy of weaponized autonomous AI. "The convergence of AI, robotics, and spatial computing" is his bet on the next-generation human-machine interface. "Earth is too small; it is our home" is his shift in perspective after flying past the Kármán line.

Putting these four things together paints the full picture of Physical AI.

Over the past two decades, the internet changed how information flows. WeChat replaced letter writing, Taobao replaced going to the market, and TikTok replaced television.

But the underlying rules of the physical world haven't changed; workers are still workers, and factories are still factories.

In the next two decades, AI might change the very way the real world operates. Factories will be staffed by humanoid robots that don't need rest, roads will flow with autonomous vehicles, battlefields will roar with drone swarms, and the first "residents" to land on the Moon and Mars will likely be pioneering AI robots.

The young man who told everyone not to buy houses in 2016 has now flown past the Kármán line.

And most of us are probably still waiting for the next Yanjiao.

Source: BlockBeats