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Too Sick for Buffett Lunch, Justin Sun Attends Tron Influencer Party in SF

Justin Sun said he postponed the Buffett lunch due to kidney stones. But that didn't stop him from briefly mingling at a Tron party Thursday night.

Tron founder and BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun
Tron founder and BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun

Tron CEO Justin Sun couldn't attend his ballyhooed lunch on Thursday with finance titan Warren Buffett because of kidney stones, he said. That didn't stop him, however, from briefly mingling with influencers at a Tron-organized party on Thursday night in San Francisco.

The appearance comes just a day after Sun penned an apology to the public, media and regulators for “over-marketing” the Buffett lunch. He didn’t specify which regulators he was referring to, but the letter has so far only been posted in simplified Chinese.

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"In the future, due to my illness, I will take some rest," he wrote in the Weibo post. “All efforts should return to blockchain tech development from marketing and hyping.”

#Tron party with @justinsuntron & @CryptoWendyO







It’s been a fun trip. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff for the channel coming soon. pic.twitter.com/toejAdeOdC



— ₿it₿oy (@Bitboy_Hodl) July 26, 2019

Despite the postponement of the main event – for which Sun submitted a $4.6 million donation to charity – after-party plans for Sun's confab with Buffett proceeded as planned.

Ten YouTubers were flown into San Francisco for Tron Influencer Day to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Tron's acquisition of BitTorrent, the storied file-sharing platform founded in 2004.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent founder and current Chia CEO Bram Cohen seemed highly displeased. “Anybody know if Justin Sun is hard up for cash?” Cohen tweeted Thursday afternoon. “He isn’t letting the last payment for BitTorrent get out of escrow.” (Speaking to Decrypt, Sun flatly denied the accusation, saying, "it has nothing to do with me.")

Sun's appearance proved to be an odd bookend to a weeklong saga about the polarizing entrepreneur. Reports surfaced Tuesday that he was under border control and barred from leaving China. Those reports were disproven later that day when Sun broadcast a video of himself from a San Francisco high-rise.

A new date for the postponed lunch has yet to be announced.

Martine Paris contributed reporting.

Tron CEO Justin Sun speaks at Consensus 2019 (photo via CoinDesk archives)

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Zack Seward