Most Chinese people know Justin Sun from his bizarre stories.

He once paid $4.5 million to have dinner with Warren Buffett, but skipped the meal and later claimed to have kidney stones; he spent $6.2 million to buy a duct-taped banana at an art exhibition, then ate it in front of a live audience; he splurged $75 million to become the largest donor to a Trump family crypto project, securing a seat at a White House state dinner; and at the age of 35, he flew across the Karman Line and dubbed himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.

However, there is also a lot of negativity. In 2023, he was sued by the SEC for market manipulation, with allegations including over 600,000 wash trades to boost the TRX price and celebrity endorsements without disclosure of payment. Currently, he is embroiled in mutual lawsuits with the Trump family-related project WLFI.

All these stories have overshadowed a more serious matter. In the past decade, this man has rarely missed any opportunity to ride the wave in the secondary capital markets.

Starting from buying BTC in 2013, to advising post-90s not to buy houses and instead invest in:

Bitcoin, NVIDIA, Tesla, Tencent.

Ten years have passed. As of May 2026, Tesla has delivered a total return of about 2683%, while NVIDIA has seen a return of nearly 24000%.

If you had followed Sun's advice back then, investing $10,000 in NVIDIA would now be worth $2.4 million, and $10,000 in Tesla would now be worth $278,000. An audience member who bet 200,000 RMB on each of these assets in 2016 would now have around 48 million from NVIDIA and about 5.4 million from Tesla, totaling over 53 million.

And this man is still shooting. On November 6, 2025, Justin Sun made a statement:

“Shortage of chips in the short term, shortage of energy in the long term, forever shortage of storage.”

The capital market's reaction to this statement only turned fervent in 2026. SanDisk, spun off from Western Digital, surged from around $35 to $1439 in a year, a nearly 50-fold increase.

HBM memory has been fully booked by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, with orders filled for 2026 and extending into 2027-2028.

While everyone was still chasing the storage concept feverishly, in early 2026, Justin Sun switched his focus in a video.

The video originally discussed the outlook for 2026. Besides adding health to his New Year's resolution list, he specifically highlighted areas for young people to focus on: embodied intelligence, drones, edge computing, and space exploration.

The author has collected Sun Yuchen's public statements on these four directions over the past two years. Stringing them together, each path has also seen the emergence of its initial leader.

Who Is the Next Storage Stock?

The first thing Sun Yuchen mentioned is Embodied Intelligence.

The concept of robots has been discussed by humans for at least a hundred years. In 1920, Czech playwright Čapek coined the term "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 in the brain.

In the past two years, the entire industry has fully embraced the VLA model, Vision-Language-Action. In simple terms, whereas robots used to follow code, they now begin to perceive the world and act accordingly.

Yushu Technology is set to ship over 5,500 humanoid robots by 2025, ranking first globally. In March 2026, they will submit an application for an IPO on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. Galaxy General raised $300 million (approximately 2.1 billion RMB) in new funding in December 2025, totaling about $800 million in funding with a valuation of $3 billion (approximately 21.1 billion RMB), setting new records in the Embodied Intelligence track for both single-round and cumulative financing.

Sun Yuchen said the probability of personally creating a robot is low, but he has a keen sense of this narrative and capital flow direction. In an interview with Bloomberg, he once said, "In a market where 99% of people do not understand the purpose of a wallet, the cost of education must be included in the business model."

This statement applied to stablecoins in 2018 and remains relevant in 2026. 99% of Chinese people have not yet used a humanoid robot, but as long as that robot can cook, move boxes, and care for the elderly, the remaining 1% represents the next opportunity.

The second track he pointed out is drones.

While humanoid robots are still ramping up production, drones have already taken a step towards commercialization. They are naturally suited for AI tasks, from autonomous navigation to swarm coordination to data collection, AI excels in these areas. Drones do not need to walk; taking off is simpler than for humanoid robots.

In the Russia-Ukraine battlefield, AI drone swarms have taken away much of the previous tank troops' role, with Ukraine aiming for a production capacity of several million drones in a single year. Above the rice fields in Chinese rural areas, agricultural drones from DJI can replace ten farmworkers. Meituan in Shenzhen has successfully implemented drone delivery, with orders delivered in under 15 minutes.

Drones are ahead of humanoid robots. It is the first form in which AI has successfully closed the loop in the physical world.

Justin Sun's third point is about Spatial Computing. This is the most niche direction he mentioned.

In 2024, Apple released the Vision Pro, which most people saw as a VR headset with a much higher price tag. This may have been a misinterpretation.

The ambition of the Vision Pro 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 if you can reach out and touch it. This may sound simple, but doing it is ten times harder than training ChatGPT. Large language models only need to understand language, while spatial computing requires an understanding of the physical world.

This happens to be a common prerequisite for robots, drones, and autonomous driving - they all require a form of spatial intelligence. Nvidia's Cosmos platform, Google's Genie 3 World Model, Tesla's FSD, they are all doing the same thing, transitioning AI from understanding text to understanding the world.

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

In the first three tracks, Sun only talked about them, but when it came to space, he actually went there.

On August 3, 2025, he sat in the capsule of Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-34 and flew over the Kármán Line.

Upon returning to Earth, he expressed an ambition - he hopes his company is no longer just a "cryptocurrency exchange," but a "space economy infrastructure service provider," using blockchain to address space asset ownership, satellite data trading, and interstellar payments. It sounds no different from science fiction. But if you look back at how he promoted USDT ten years ago, it also seemed no different from science fiction back then.

Back on Earth, he directly told the young people, "Space exploration is the common mission of all humanity. I hope that through this flight, more young people will be inspired to engage in technology and innovation, shaping the interstellar future of mankind together."

Justin's Investment Logic

Justin Sun's publicly expressed investment logic is: find a track with a clear direction, invest on both ends, and do not bet on the execution capability of a single company.

On the robotics track, his framework is to bet on separating the body and the brain.

He bet on the body with Tesla. In early 2026, Tesla announced the cessation of production of the Model S and Model X, transforming the Fremont factory into the Optimus production line, with a target annual output of one million units, and a mass production unit price of about $20,000 to $25,000; the existing version of Optimus has been doing parts transfer and sorting at the Austin and Fremont factories, and the Gen 3 production line will be launched in the summer of 2026.

NVIDIA is betting big on AI. The Jetson Thor squeezes server-level AI inference into the robot's body, Isaac GR00T has almost become an industry-standard base, and Jensen Huang announced at GTC that there will be 1 billion humanoid robots worldwide by 2035.

Whether Optimus can deliver on time is Musk's concern, not NVIDIA's. As long as the track is clear, tolls will be collected.

For the drone sector, the core judgment is the irreversible nature of Physical AI in military scenarios.

AeroVironment's Switchblade loitering munition has become a signature weapon in Ukraine, with monthly production capacity increased from 40 units to 500 units, aiming for 1200 units. A $3.9 billion order has secured future revenue for the next three years. Kratos' XQ-58 Valkyrie is the "loyal wingman" to the F-35, with manned aircraft performing missions and unmanned aircraft handling wingman duties. Priced at less than a fraction of a fifth-generation fighter jet, it surged by 280% in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.

One is making tanks unprofitable, the other is making manned aircraft redundant, and the two ends of the spectrum complement each other.

In the space sector, in 2021, Justin Sun secured a Blue Origin flight seat for $28 million, which he donated to Blue Origin's STEM charity fund, distributed among 19 non-profit organizations. On August 3, 2025, he completed a suborbital flight mission aboard the New Shepard NS-34.

In the public market, SpaceX submitted a confidential IPO filing to the SEC in April 2026, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, set to become the largest IPO in human history. In Q1 2026, Rocket Lab's revenue surpassed $200 million, serving as the most direct alternative target for those unable to invest in SpaceX.

Once SpaceX goes public, the entire space sector's pricing paradigm will need to be rewritten.

Listen to Brother Sun

By stringing together Sun Yuchen's statements from the past two years, his judgment that "AI, robots, and blockchain have reached the iPhone moment" becomes clear. His prediction of "robot armies and robotic police" reflects his foresight into autonomous weaponized AI. His bet on the "integration of AI, robots, and space computing" represents his vision for the next generation of human-machine interfaces. Lastly, "Earth is too small, it is our home" signifies his perspective shift after crossing the Karman Line.

The full picture of Physical AI comes together when four things are combined.

Over the past two decades, the Internet has changed the way information flows. WeChat has replaced letters, Taobao has replaced physical markets, and Douyin has replaced television.

However, the underlying rules of the physical world remain unchanged; workers are still workers, and factories are still factories.

In the next two decades, AI may change the very way the real world operates. Humanoid robots that don't need rest will stand in factories, the streets will be filled with autonomous vehicles, the battlefield will echo with swarms of drones, and the first "residents" on the Moon and Mars are likely to be advanced AI robots.

The young person who told everyone not to buy a house in 2016 has now flown past the Carmen Line.

Meanwhile, most of us are probably still waiting for the next opportunity like Yanjiao.

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