Justin Sun was already one of the richest people in the world, having made his fortune in the no-rules early phase of the crypto industry, when he first met the three men from World Liberty Financial. It was October 2024, and the only thing Sun knew of the company they were hoping he would invest in was that it was being launched by then-candidate Donald Trump and his three sons.

Neither Don Jr., Eric, and Barron nor anyone else with the Trump name was on the video call that day. Instead, on the other side were World Liberty’s three top executives: an internet-marketing hustler who had spent time in jail on drug charges and been sued multiple times for fraud, a former professional pickup artist, and the son of Donald Trump’s best friend. Chase Herro, the internet marketer, was a wiry 41-year-old with sleeve tattoos, perma-stubble, and a vocabulary rich in blue-collar slang. Zak Folkman, the pickup artist, also 41, had both ears pierced and win! tattooed on one biceps in a comic-book-style speech bubble. He and Herro had previously launched a crypto platform that was hacked and drained of money, prompting accusations from at least one large investor of insider theft. The third co-founder was Zach Witkoff, the 33-year-old son of Steve Witkoff, the real-estate mogul who now serves as President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. Zach Witkoff had been arrested for cocaine possession leaving a Miami nightclub in 2022 and generally presented as an awkward rich kid (“If you could anthropomorphize a squirrel,” as a former World Liberty adviser put it). “My dad got shot at with the president the other day,” Witkoff said by way of introduction on the call.

Sun, who was raised in China by middle-class journalist parents and earned a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, built his fortune by launching his own blockchain, Tron, which became popular in Asia as a fast and cheap way to move U.S.-dollar stablecoins. Tron’s digital coin, $TRX, with a market cap of some $31 billion, is the eighth-most-valuable cryptocurrency in the world. According to Forbes, Sun’s net worth is an estimated $8.5 billion, making him richer than George Soros and not far behind Bill Ackman. (Sun suggests he’s worth more than that; when Bloomberg estimated his wealth at $12.5 billion, Sun sued.)

In his ascendancy, Sun had not escaped the attention of the U.S. government. In March 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Biden administration charged him and his companies with fraud, alleging market manipulation and the unregistered offer and sale of securities. Sun was charged simultaneously with Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Akon, and Soulja Boy, who were accused of illegally hawking Tron’s cryptocurrency without disclosing Sun paid them to do so. The SEC also accused Sun of artificially inflating the price of $TRX by making “hundreds of thousands” of essentially fake trades among his own accounts — and of lying: “Sun materially misrepresented the truth about the touting campaign to deceive investors,” according to the SEC. Later that year, Tron made headlines for reportedly being used by terrorist groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, putting additional heat on Sun, who had reportedly avoided traveling to the U.S. for years out of fear he’d be arrested. (Tron later took measures to better police its platform.)

Now, on the eve of the presidential election, the three guys on the Zoom were offering Sun an interesting investment opportunity that, should Trump win a second term, might also conveniently help relieve this legal pressure. Don Jr. and Eric Trump were all in on the project, the three World Liberty founders said on the call. In fact, the Trump family, at the time, owned 75 percent of the business. The Trumps’ passion for World Liberty, the founders told Sun, came from being “debanked,” or off-loaded as clients, by JPMorgan and Capital One in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. They were committed to pursuing a crypto alternative for their wealth — a way to control their own money through uncensurable digital wallets. Trump would preside over a financial revolution enabling regular citizens to bypass banks and invest their assets freely across decentralized crypto platforms.

World Liberty would build innovative projects that delivered on the new administration’s ambitions. “They said they were the victims of those centralized controls,” says Sun. “I believe in the vision of what was presented.” Sun, who has a libertarian streak (he became an Ayn Rand fan in graduate school), says he identified with fears of a “very big centralized power that eventually will enslave everyone.” He liked the pitch enough that he was willing to overlook the founders’ worrisome backgrounds.

In November 2024, Sun transferred $30 million to World Liberty and came aboard as an adviser, receiving billions of yet-to-launch $WLFI coins — the key token in the company’s future crypto ecosystem — in exchange. He was immediately the biggest investor in the project. Sun’s involvement also gave World Liberty a halo of safety in the eyes of many other crypto investors. In the month before Sun invested, World Liberty had brought in only $21 million from other investors, a fraction of its target. After Sun’s involvement was made public, money poured in (including another $15 million from Sun). World Liberty closed its initial sale in January 2025, having raised $300 million.

Over the next year or so, Sun would come to believe he’d made a colossal mistake. World Liberty would disappoint his expectations and those of many other investors: The decentralized crypto products it promised would largely never materialize; the money investors put in would remain mostly locked away from them; and the $WLFI cryptocurrency would crash, leaving many token holders with huge losses while the president and his partners made hundreds of millions in profits. Sun would be stripped of his tokens entirely. “Today, the thing I regret the most is not only that my money got stuck but that my name is on the project,” Sun says. “I believe many other people also got harmed.” In April 2026, he filed a lawsuit against World Liberty alleging fraud and breach of contract. When we spoke in June via Zoom, it was late in the evening in Hong Kong, where he lives. His background was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, but when the screen faltered, I could see he was lying down, his head on a pillow. Wearing a deep-blue crewneck T-shirt, he drank water from a carafe as he walked me through his past and his time with World Liberty. Our conversation took place under the shadow of defamation claims World Liberty had recently made against Sun, and he seemed torn between wanting to condemn the company’s actions and staying within the guardrails his lawyers had set for him. But he couldn’t hide his outrage at World Liberty — for making a mockery of the principles it was purportedly founded on and for, in his eyes, essentially stealing his money in full public view. “I never expected this to happen to me,” says Sun. “This is the worst-case scenario.”

Sun’s account, and those of others who invested in and worked for the company, depict an enterprise that was partially inspired and de facto run by Herro — a man whose career might be characterized as a high-speed succession of shameless for-profit hustles. Sun and other investors describe how World Liberty soaked up hundreds of millions in investments based on the Trumps’ involvement, then sat on the money. Outside investors, including Sun, always seemed to lose, while company insiders always won. “I thought surely these people would not do what they did with such a public profile attached,” says Sun. “Looking back, I was wrong about that. Unfortunately, as alleged in the complaint, certain operators leveraged the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”

The president’s financial disclosures reveal that, in 2025, his ventures brought in at least $2.2 billion with crypto accounting for more than half of that total. The largest individual element of that historic windfall — likely the best financial year of his life and the most profitable ever for any president — was World Liberty, which put some $800 million into Trump’s pocket. While the Trumps were hands off on day-to-day matters — and Sun is careful to say his issues are not with the Trumps directly — they were the largest owners of the company and certainly the ones who decided its shape. “No president I can think of has ever exploited the office this way for their own personal monetary gain,” says Don Fox, who served as general counsel and then acting director of the Office of Government Ethics under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “In the post-Watergate era, nobody’s gotten wealthy off the presidency, certainly not fabulously wealthy.” Trump has also used his office to protect his investment, signing an executive order essentially instructing the SEC to go easy on crypto as soon as he was inaugurated and while World Liberty was still raising money, which, Fox adds, “is a criminal offense” for any executive-branch official except the president and the vice-president.

Trump didn’t start out a crypto booster. In 2019, he said he was “not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money.” Trump argued they “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Out of office, though, he seems to have been awakened to what crypto could do for him: It was popular with young men, a key part of his base, and the industry became an enthusiastic source of campaign contributions. He seems, too, to have recognized that it could make him much richer than he already was.

Trump’s sudden interest in crypto can be traced back to a seemingly serendipitous meeting with Chase Herro in 2023. As Herro tells the story, he bumped into Zach Witkoff that summer at the Witkoffs’ golf resort, the Shell Bay Club, near Miami, and Zach offered to drive him around the course. “Literally, on the golf cart, we just started shooting the shit,” Herro later told Fortune. They became fast friends. Zach introduced Herro to his father, Steve, and the elder Witkoff brokered a meeting between Herro and Trump.

Sitting with Trump, then in exile at Mar-a-Lago, Herro needed to prove that there was real money in crypto — and that he, seemingly a nobody, was actually absurdly rich. Herro pulled out his phone and moved some $100 million in crypto coins from one wallet to another. Trump was sold. “That turned the lights on,” says a former World Liberty adviser who has known Herro for several years. (The White House had no comment; a spokesperson for World Liberty said this “story is inaccurate” but did not specify why.) From there, Trump began courting the crypto vote and receiving generous contributions from the industry. He declared he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet” and branded himself the future “crypto president.” He officially launched World Liberty shortly before the election and his own $TRUMP meme coin (an entirely separate crypto venture) in January 2025, days prior to his inauguration. Says the former adviser, “Chase was very proud: ‘Who would have thought? Dirtbag like me.’”

Herro, roughly five-foot-ten with a slender build that he has described as the body of a 12-year-old synchronized swimmer, grew up in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin. His family was “very poor,” he said on a podcast in early 2020: “I think when you live in poverty, you assume everybody’s poor.” He sold marijuana and was arrested at least four times before his 18th birthday on charges including theft — for a scheme in which he was caught on-camera cashing his stepfather’s checks — and drug possession. Herro’s mother once called the police on him for domestic abuse. Shortly after high school, following a drug-related arrest, Herro cut off his ankle monitor and fled to California, according to a story he’s told to friends and on podcasts.

When he got to California in the mid-aughts, Herro, who pronounces (and often spells) his name Hero, reinvented his origins. He described his mother as an ultrawealthy cheese-factory magnate and his father as a Mafia member who had been murdered in front of him, according to former roommates. (On podcasts years later, Herro said that his father had died of a heart attack and was found alone in his home and that he’d bought his mom a house, told her to “quit her job, and let her retire.”“My parents have no money,” he said on a separate podcast.) He worked at an ampm gas station in San Diego and then in construction, but he bragged about having a second home and a fancy-car collection. “None of that existed,” says a former friend. “He was like, ‘You just gotta talk about it like it’s already here.’”

A former roommate says even two decades ago he clocked Herro as a sociopath. “Literally everything is a lie,” says the former roommate. “The watches he’s wearing, the sunglasses — fake. He wouldn’t say he went to McDonald’s; he’d say, ‘I ate at Ruth’s Chris.’” (That was not the only time someone made this assessment about Herro. “If someone calls me a sociopath, I kind of, like, look over and I’m like, ‘Thanks, I think?’” Herro said on a podcast in 2020. “If you’re going to invest money in a day trader or investor, I want them to be a sociopath.”)

Herro’s........

© Daily Intelligencer