50x storage later, Justin Sun is always looking at the next decade

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

He paid $30 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett, then stood him up at the last minute citing a kidney stone. He bought a banana taped to a wall for $6.2 million and ate it at the press conference. He became the largest investor in the Trump family’s crypto project by spending $75 million, earning a seat at the White House dinner. At 35, he flew past the Kármán line, proclaiming himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.

There’s no shortage of negative press either. In 2023, the SEC sued him for market manipulation, including allegations of over 600,000 wash trades to pump the price of TRX and hiring celebrities to promote tokens without disclosing compensation. Currently, he is involved in mutual lawsuits with WLFI, a project tied to the Trump family.

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

Starting to buy BTC in 2013, by 2016 he was advising the post-90s generation not to buy houses, but to buy:

Bitcoin, Nvidia, Tesla, Tencent.

Ten years later. As of May 2026, Tesla’s total return is approximately 2683%, and Nvidia’s total return is nearly 24,000%.

If you had followed Brother Sun’s advice and put 10,000 yuan into Nvidia, it would be worth 2.4 million yuan today; 10,000 yuan into Tesla would be 278,000 yuan. An audience member who invested 200,000 yuan in each asset on that list in 2016 would see that Nvidia stake alone become about 48 million yuan, the Tesla stake about 5.4 million yuan, totaling over 53 million yuan.

And this man is still firing shots today. On November 6, 2025, Justin Sun threw out a statement:

“Short-term chip shortage, long-term energy shortage, and always a storage shortage.”

The capital market’s reaction to this statement only turned frenzied starting in 2026. SanDisk (SNDK), spun off from Western Digital, rose from a low of about $35 to a high of $1439, a maximum gain of nearly 50 times.

HBM memory capacity from the three major manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron is fully booked. It was already sold out for 2026, with orders queued into 2027-2028.

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

That video was originally about his 2026 outlook. Besides health-related topics like adding well-being to his New Year’s list, he specifically set aside time to focus on areas for the younger generation: embodied intelligence, drones, spatial computing, and space exploration.

The author has collected Justin Sun's public statements over the past two years regarding these four directions. Pieced together, each path has already seen the emergence of its initial capital leaders.

Who is the next storage stock?

The first direction Justin Sun pointed out is embodied intelligence.

The concept of robots has been discussed by humanity for at least a hundred years. In 1920, Czech playwright Čapek coined the word “Robot.” Industrial robotic arms have been used since the 1980s, and Honda’s ASIMO could go up and down stairs over twenty years ago. But the real bottleneck has always been the “brain.”

In the last two years, the entire industry has shifted towards VLA models: Vision-Language-Action. In plain English, robots used to operate by reading code; now, they start to understand the world by seeing it.

Unitree shipped over 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, ranking first globally, and filed for an IPO on the STAR Market in March 2026. Galaxy Bot secured a new round of funding worth $300 million (approximately 21 billion RMB) in December 2025, bringing its cumulative funding to about $800 million and a valuation of $3 billion (approximately 211 billion RMB), setting dual records for single-round and cumulative funding in the embodied intelligence track.

Justin Sun said he probably won’t build robots himself, but he has a sense for this narrative and capital flow. In an interview with Bloomberg, he once 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 explained stablecoins in 2018, and it also applies in 2026. 99% of Chinese people have never used an embodied intelligence robot. But if that robot can cook, carry boxes, and look after the elderly, that remaining 1% represents the next opportunity.

The second track he pointed to is drones.

While humanoid robots are still ramping up mass production, drones have already advanced towards commercial deployment. They are naturally suited for AI tasks, from autonomous navigation to swarm coordination to data collection. They don’t need to walk; flying is actually simpler than humanoid robot locomotion.

On the battlefields of Ukraine, AI drone swarms have already taken over much of the role of tank units. Ukraine’s annual drone production target has climbed into the millions. Above Chinese rice paddies, DJI agricultural drones fly, each replacing ten farmworkers. In Shenzhen, Meituan has already made drone delivery operational, with orders to delivery taking no more than 15 minutes.

Drones are ahead of humanoid robots. They represent the first form of AI achieving a closed commercial loop in the physical world.

The third direction Justin Sun pointed out is spatial computing. This is the least mainstream of the directions he mentioned.

In 2024, Apple released the Vision Pro, and most people dismissed it as an overly expensive VR headset. This might be a misinterpretation.

The Vision Pro’s ambition has little to do with VR. It is Apple’s first attempt to make 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. This sounds simple, but it is ten times harder than training ChatGPT. Large language models only need to understand language; spatial computing needs to understand physics.

This is precisely the common prerequisite for robotics, drones, and autonomous driving – they all require 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 can manage by understanding language, but the next generation of AI needs to understand the world itself.

For the first three tracks, Justin Sun only verbally identified them, but when it came to space, he physically went there himself.

On August 3, 2025, he sat inside Blue Origin’s “New Shepard” NS-34 capsule and flew past the Kármán line.

After returning to Earth, he expressed an ambition: hoping his company would 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 evangelized USDT ten years ago, people thought that was science fiction too.

Back on Earth, his message to young people was more direct: “Space exploration is a common mission for all humanity. I hope this flight can inspire more young people to engage in technology and innovation, jointly shaping humanity’s interstellar future.”

Brother Sun’s Investment Logic

Justin Sun’s publicly expressed investment logic is: find tracks with certain directions, lay out positions at both ends simultaneously, and don’t bet on a single company’s execution.

For the robotics line, his framework is betting on the body and the brain separately.

Betting on the body with Tesla. In early 2026, Tesla announced it would stop production of the Model S and Model X, converting the Fremont factory into an Optimus production line, targeting an annual output of one million units with a unit price of around $20,000 to $25,000. The current version of Optimus is already handling parts transport and sorting at the Austin and Fremont factories, with the Gen 3 production line set to start in the summer of 2026.

Betting on the brain with Nvidia. Jetson Thor packs server-grade AI inference into the robot itself, and Isaac GR00T has become an industry-wide base platform. Jensen Huang predicted 1 billion humanoid robots globally by 2035 at GTC.

Whether Optimus delivers on schedule is Elon Musk’s problem, not Nvidia’s. As long as the track works, tolls will be collected.

For the drone line, the core judgment is the irreversibility of Physical AI in military scenarios.

AeroVironment’s Switchblade loitering munitions became iconic weapons in Ukraine. Monthly production went from 40 units to 500, targeting 1,200. A $3.9 billion order book locks in revenue for the next three years. Kratos’ XQ-58 Valkyrie serves as the F-35’s “loyal wingman,” with manned aircraft on missions and drones running flanks, at a fraction of the cost of a fifth-generation fighter. It rose 280% in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.

One company makes tanks uneconomical; the other makes manned aircraft redundant. The logic of these two ends is complementary.

For the space line, Justin Sun won Blue Origin’s flight seat for $28 million in 2021, donating the money to the Blue Origin STEM charity fund, which distributed it among 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 be the largest IPO in human history. Rocket Lab exceeded $200 million in Q1 2026 revenue, serving as the most direct alternative when SpaceX isn’t available.

Once SpaceX goes public, the pricing coordinates for the entire space sector will be rewritten.

Listen to what Brother Sun says

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

Put these four pieces together, and you get the complete picture of Physical AI.

In the past two decades, the internet changed the way information flows. WeChat replaced letters, Taobao replaced markets, and Douyin replaced television.

But the underlying rules of the physical world didn’t change. Workers were still workers, and factories were still factories.

In the next two decades, AI may change the very operation of the real world. Factories will have tireless humanoid robots. Roads will be filled with autonomous vehicles. Battlefields will rumble with swarms of drones. The first “residents” to land on the moon and Mars will likely be advanced 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 might still be waiting for the next Yanjiao.