Blockchain billionaire and art collector Justin Sun made global headlines in November after shelling out $6.2 million at Sotheby’s for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), his infamous banana duct-taped to a wall. Sun then ate the banana at a buzzy press conference in Hong Kong.
However, it seems Sun didn’t have a taste for all the press that come of it.
According to Fortune, the blockchain billionaire and art collector pressured the crypto trade publication CoinDesk to retract a December 2 article by Callan Quinn that was critical of Sun’s press conference. The article was titled “I Watched Justin Sun Eat the World’s Most Expensive Banana. I Don’t Get It.”
“After Sun’s team complained about the tone of the piece, CoinDesk’s owners, the crypto exchange Bullish, demanded editorial staff remove it from the publication’s website, according to sources familiar with the matter,” Fortune reports, adding that former Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray left his position as chair of an editorial committee in December.
The report states that the decision to remove the piece from the site came from Bullish, which acquired the publication from Digital Currency Group in 2023 for roughly $75 million. CoinDesk won a George Polk Award for its reporting on crypto currency FTX exchange, which resulted in the company’s bankruptcy and the arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The CoinDesk report, which can be read in an archived form, expressed skepticism over Sun’s publicity stunt. It delved into his troubles with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which has charged him and Tron, the blockchain he founded, with fraud, among other security violations. Sun and Tron have moved to have the lawsuit dismissed. The report also stated that Sun’s legal team has a history of threatening media outlets with legal action for reporting on the accusations leveled against Tron.
Quinn’s piece describes the media fervor around Sun’s banana-eating stunt, and by extension his acquisition of Comedian, as “ridiculous” and the conference as a “marketing gimmick”. Of Sun’s acquisition of the artwork, Quinn noted that the reaction “among many observers was the typical one seen whenever anyone spends a large sum of money on modern art: bewilderment, a bit of disgust, an eye roll.”
At the conference, Sun mentioned Shah Alam, the vendor who sold Cattalan the banana and was subsequently shocked to learn of its million-dollar-sale from New York Times reporters. Sun said he wanted to “thank” Alam by buying 100,000 bananas from his stand. Alam, however, does not own the stand.
The Hong Kong–based entrepreneur returned to headlines shortly afterward when he invested some $30 million in Donald Trump’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial, which has proclaimed its intentions to “make finance great again.” Sun is currently its largest sole investor and an adviser to its board.
ARTnews has contacted Sun and Tron for comment.
The post “Blockchain Billionaire Justin Sun Allegedly Squashed an Article Critical of His Banana-Eating Stunt” by Tessa Solomon was published on 01/04/2025 by www.artnews.com