"Late last month, an infamous 5-year-old artwork titled Comedian, which consists solely of one (1) banana attached to a gallery wall via a single strip of duct tape, was sold off by Sotheby’s for a whopping $6.2 million—up from the $1.5 million asking price it commanded pre-auction. (Cue the inevitable Arrested Development references.) The lucky new owner? Chinese cryptocurrency maven Justin Sun, who has since eaten the art.
On the surface, it’s a funny curiosity of a story that would normally take up just enough of the news cycle for viewers to jab their thumbs and mutter to one another, “Can you believe this shit?” But Justin Sun’s involvement here takes this beyond the realm of mere amusement and into something far more insidious: a yearslong saga of skimping on international law, funneling ill-gotten wealth and splurging ostentatiously, abusing employees, becoming the subject of government investigations, plagiarizing white papers, and sucking up to President-elect Donald Trump for the sake of rewiring American financial regulation as we know it. It’s a literal pay-for-play, with Sun announcing just one day after the banana stunt that he would invest $30 million in Trump’s crypto scheme, World Liberty Financial, and bail it out of financial insolvency, earning an advisory role with the firm in the process.
The banana is not just a sideshow distraction for Sun on this execrable journey; it is very much part and parcel of his drive for wealth and power, as evidenced by how vocally he compared Comedian to NFTs and blockchain entries while eating the thing. There are many reasons why Justin Sun is so notorious within the crypto world, even though he remained mostly unknown to the wider public before now. So let’s break down why this whole thing stinks … kinda like a rotting banana."
https://slate.com/technology/2024/12/justin-sun-banana-art-crypto-billionaire-criminal-comedian-maurizio-cattelan.html
It took one plucky competitor to disintegrate the overinflated 
