After 50x Gains in Storage, Justin Sun Sets His Sights on the Next Decade

Most people in China first learned about Justin Sun through his eccentric stories.

He paid $30 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett, only to stand him up at the last minute due to a kidney stone; he spent $6.2 million on a banana taped to a wall and ate it in front of everyone at a press conference; he dropped $7500 million to become the largest donor to the Trump family's crypto project, earning a seat at a White House dinner; and at age 35, he flew past the Karman Line, crowning himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.

There is no shortage of negativity either. In 2023, he was sued by the SEC for market manipulation, with allegations including over 600,000 wash trades to pump the price of TRX and hiring celebrities to promote it without disclosing their compensation. Currently, he is in a mutual legal battle with the Trump-related project WLFI.

These stories have spread so widely that they almost overshadow a serious fact:

This man has missed almost no major investment trend in the secondary capital markets over the past decade.

Starting with purchasing BTC in 2013, by 2016, he was recommending that the post-90s generation should not buy houses, but instead buy:

Bitcoin, Nvidia, Tesla, and Tencent.

A decade has passed. As of May 2026, Tesla's total return is approximately 2,683%, and Nvidia's total return is nearly 24,000%.

If you had followed Sun's advice and bought 10,000 RMB worth of Nvidia back then, it would be worth 2.4 million today; 10,000 RMB in Tesla would be worth 278,000 today. A listener who put 200,000 RMB into each item on that list in 2016 would see the Nvidia stake alone turn into about 48 million and the Tesla stake into about 5.4 million, totaling over 53 million.

And this man is still firing shots today. On November 6, 2025, Justin Sun dropped a sentence:

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

The capital market's reaction to this sentence only entered a frenzy in 2026. SanDisk (SNDK), spun off from Western Digital, rose from a low of about $35 to $1,439 in one year, a maximum increase of nearly 50 times.

HBM memory capacity has been fully booked by the three major original manufacturers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. 2026 is already sold out, and orders are lined up through 2027-2028.

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

That video was originally about the outlook for 2026. Besides health-related topics like adding wellness to his New Year's list, he dedicated a significant amount of time to topics for young people: Embodied AI, Drones, Spatial Computing, and Space Exploration.

I have collected Justin Sun's public statements on these four directions over the past two years. Looking at them together, each path has already produced its preliminary capital leaders.

1. Who is the Next Storage Stock?

The first point Justin Sun mentioned was Embodied AI.

The concept of robots has been discussed 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 climb stairs over twenty years ago. But the real bottleneck has always been the brain.

In the last two years, the entire industry has shifted toward VLA models—Vision-Language-Action. In plain terms, robots used to act based on code; now, they act based on seeing the world.

Unitree Robotics shipped over 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, ranking first globally, and filed for a STAR Market IPO in March 2026. Agibot (Galaxy General) secured a new $300 million (approx. 2.1 billion RMB) funding round in December 2025, with cumulative financing of about $800 million and a valuation of $3 billion (approx. 21.1 billion RMB), breaking records for both single-round and cumulative financing in the embodied AI sector.

Justin Sun said he likely won't build robots himself, but he has an intuition for the direction of narrative and capital flow.

In a Bloomberg interview, 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 explained stablecoins in 2018, and it applies equally in 2026. 99% of Chinese people have yet to use an embodied AI robot, but as long as that robot can cook, move boxes, or care for the elderly, the remaining 1% is the next opportunity.

The second sector he pointed to is Drones.

While humanoid robots are still ramping up mass production, drones have already reached commercial implementation. They are naturally suited for AI tasks, from autonomous navigation to swarm coordination and data collection. They don't need to walk; flying is actually simpler than humanoid movement.

On the battlefields of Ukraine, AI drone swarms have taken over much of the role previously held by tank units. Ukraine's annual drone production target has climbed to millions. Over China's rice fields, DJI's agricultural drones are flying, with one machine replacing ten laborers. Meituan in Shenzhen has already streamlined drone delivery, with orders arriving in under 15 minutes.

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

The third point Justin Sun mentioned is Spatial Computing. This is the least mainstream of his directions.

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

Vision Pro's ambition has little 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, and whether the coffee cup is to the left or right of the sofa. This sounds simple but 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 robots, drones, and autonomous driving—they all need a form of spatial intelligence. Nvidia's Cosmos platform, Google's Genie 3 world model, and Tesla's FSD are all doing the same thing: letting AI transition from understanding text to understanding the world.

ChatGPT understanding language is enough, but the next generation of AI needs to understand the world itself.

While Justin Sun only mentioned the first three sectors, he actually went to space in person.

On August 3, 2025, he sat in the cabin of Blue Origin's "New Shepard" NS-34 and flew past the Karman Line.

After returning to Earth, he expressed an ambition for his company to no longer be just a "cryptocurrency exchange," but an "infrastructure service provider for the space economy," using blockchain to solve space asset rights, satellite data trading, and cross-planetary payments. It sounds like science fiction. But looking back at how he preached 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 the common mission of all mankind. I hope this flight inspires more young people to devote themselves to technology and innovation, jointly shaping the interstellar future of humanity."

2. Justin Sun's Investment Logic

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

For the robot line, his framework is to bet on the body and the brain separately.

Tesla is the bet on the body. In early 2026, it announced the end of Model S and Model X production to convert the Fremont factory into an Optimus production line, aiming for an annual output of one million units with a target price of $20,000 to $25,000. The current version of Optimus is already doing parts handling and sorting at the Austin and Fremont factories, and the Gen 3 line will start in the summer of 2026.

Nvidia is the bet on the brain. Jetson Thor crams server-grade AI inference into the robot body, and Isaac GR00T has almost become the industry's universal foundation. Jensen Huang shouted at GTC that there would be 1 billion humanoid robots worldwide by 2035.

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

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

AeroVironment's Switchblade loitering munition became a landmark weapon in Ukraine, with monthly production pulling from 40 to 500 units, targeting 1,200. $3.9 billion in orders have locked in revenue for the next three years. Kratos's XQ-58 Valkyrie is the "loyal wingman" for the F-35; manned aircraft fly the mission while drones fly the flanks. The unit price is a fraction of a fifth-generation fighter. It rose 280% in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.

One makes tanks uneconomical, and the other makes manned fighters redundant—the logic of the two ends is complementary.

For the space line, Justin Sun bid $28 million for a Blue Origin flight seat in 2021, donating the money to Blue Origin's STEM foundation, which distributed it to 19 non-profits. On August 3, 2025, he completed a suborbital flight on the New Shepard NS-34 mission.

In the public market, SpaceX filed a confidential IPO draft with the SEC in April 2026, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would be the largest IPO in human history. Rocket Lab's Q1 2026 revenue broke $200 million, making it the most direct alternative when SpaceX is unavailable.

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

3. You Should Listen to Justin Sun

Connecting Justin Sun's statements over the past two years:

"AI, robots, and blockchain have reached their iPhone moment" is his judgment on embodied AI.

"Robot armies, robot police" is his prediction for autonomous weaponized AI.

"The fusion of AI, robots, and spatial computing" is his bet on the next-generation human-computer interface.

"The Earth is too small; it is our home" is his perspective shift after flying past the Karman Line.

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

In the past twenty years, the Internet changed how information flows. WeChat replaced letters, Taobao replaced markets, and Douyin replaced TV.

But the underlying rules of the physical world didn't move. Workers are still workers, and factories are still factories.

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

Meanwhile, most of us might still be waiting for the next real estate boom in Yanjiao.

This article was first published on the public account "Zhangsheng BeatZ." Welcome to follow.