Tron founder Justin Solar will be a part of the subsequent Blue Origin crewed flight, the corporate introduced Tuesday. He’s the newest high-profile determine to board Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard rocket.
Solar received the primary New Shepard seat in a 2021 public sale with a $28 million bid that funded 19 space-focused charities, however couldn’t attend the July 2021 flight because of a scheduling battle.
He’ll fly alongside actual property investor Arvi Bahal, Turkish businessman Gökhan Erdem, Puerto Rican meteorologist Deborah Martorell, UK-born nonprofit founder Lionel Pitchford, and enterprise capitalist J.D. Russell on the NS-34 mission.
One other Billionaire Heads to Area
In its official press launch, Blue Origin revealed that this would be the 14th human flight for its New Shepard program and the thirty fourth in its total flight historical past, with the launch date to be introduced.
The mission will add six extra people to the 70 individuals Blue Origin has flown previous the Kármán line, the internationally acknowledged boundary of house.
Solar was featured on Forbes’ April 2025 cowl as one in every of crypto’s most outspoken figures. He joins a rising roster of entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and celebrities who’ve flown with Blue Origin, which has included William Shatner, Michael Strahan, Katy Perry, and Gayle King in earlier missions.
From Sculpture Disputes to Consuming a $5M Banana
Earlier this yr, Solar filed a lawsuit in opposition to music mogul David Geffen in Manhattan federal court docket to reclaim or obtain as much as $80 million in damages for an Alberto Giacometti sculpture he claims was stolen and bought with out his consent.
The Tron founder alleged {that a} former aide, Xiong Zihan Sydney, cast paperwork and used a faux lawyer to execute the sale of the Le Nez sculpture, and swapped it for Geffen’s artwork and money price round $65.5 million. Geffen’s authorized workforce, nonetheless, known as the lawsuit “weird and baseless,” whereas rejecting Solar’s claims and denying any wrongdoing within the dispute.
Final November, Solar bought one in every of three restricted version rights to Maurizio Cattelan’s Comic – the 2019 art work displaying a banana duct-taped to a wall at a New York public sale for $5.2 million. Not lengthy after the acquisition, he publicly ate the banana on stage.
He additionally pledged to purchase 100,000 bananas from the New York road vendor who had initially supplied the fruit for the art work.
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