Chinese crypto businessman eats his controversial $6.2 million banana art piece
Chinese-born crypto founder Justin Sun eats a banana artwork composed of a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape in Hong Kong on Friday after buying the provocative work of conceptual art by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan at a New York auction for $6.2 million.
Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images
Chinese cryptocurrency businessman Justin Sun, who last week purchased a $6.2 million art piece consisting solely of a banana duct taped to a wall, ate the banana on Friday in a move he bragged about on social media.
“Many friends have asked me about the taste of the banana,” Sun wrote in a post on X alongside a video of him eating the multimillion-dollar Maurizio Cattelan piece called Comedian.
“To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like,” said Sun, the founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron.
Big Mike bananas — a common translation of the flavorful Gros Michel banana variety — were once ubiquitous and have now become virtually impossible to find.
Sun wrote that as thanks to Shah Alam — the 74-year-old Bangladeshi fruit stand employee who originally sold the banana for just 25 cents — he would purchase 100,000 bananas to be distributed for free to Alam’s customers.
Speaking to the New York Times, however, Alam noted a number of logistical issues with Sun’s proposal.
The profit on bananas is relatively low, Alam told the paper — only about $6,000 on a purchase of 100,000 bananas. And Alam is an employee of the fruit stand, not its owner.
His salary of $12/hour during his 12-hour workday, which affords him a shared basement apartment in the Bronx, would not be affected by a bulk novelty sale.
This is not Sun’s first venture into multimillion-dollar bids. In 2019, he won a $4.8 million bid to have lunch with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. In 2021, he put up $28 million to be among the first passengers on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, though that trip was ultimately canceled.
