The Mystery Chinese Crypto Boss Paying Elon Musk a Fortune for Space Mission #CriptoNews

He is a China-born cryptocurrency billionaire who says he travels with six passports, follows Mars time, and is a homeless refugee.

Chun Wang, 42, often lives in the remote Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard but flies somewhere nearly every other day on what he says is a personal quest to visit each of Earth’s 249 officially designated countries and territories.

And any day this spring he is due to take off on a paid flight to space.

“ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE,” Wang wrote on X.

When Wang takes off from billionaire Elon Musk’s Florida launch site in a SpaceX Dragon capsule together with three other amateur astronauts on what is set to be the first ever human space flight to orbit directly over the North and South Poles, scientists and security specialists will also be watching.

Details of the experiments Wang and his crew plan to carry out and the equipment they will use are not fully public. But both space and the polar regions are increasing frontiers for superpower competition between the United States and its main adversary China while Russia is heavily involved both as a Chinese partner and in its own right. That adds to the questions over exactly who Wang is, what he does and who his connections are. Wang rejects allegations made by critics over his crypto businesses. Although he was born in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, the founder of one of the world’s biggest crypto mining companies, F2Pool, and a crypto staking company, Stake.Fish, is now a citizen of the Mediterranean island of Malta.

“There should be red flags going off everywhere,” said Troy Bouffard, Director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who believes that some of the research the Fram2 plans to conduct could have military as well as scientific uses. Among other things, Wang and his crew will study “strange” white light and fragments in the aurora that flash in the polar skies and could cause problems for satellites, Svalbard-based aurora scientist Katie Herlingshaw said in an interview.

Bouffard told Newsweek“There are things to learn, and it’s never been done before, and the thing that’s neat about this and unique and special is that polar orbiting provides global coverage whereas other satellites don’t.”

Joining Mission Commander Wang on the expedition will be Norwegian cinematographer and Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, German scientist and Mission Pilot Rabea Rogge, and Australian Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips, according to a factsheet supplied by Fram2 spokesperson Jesica Eastman. The crew plans to zip between the poles in 46 minutes and 40 seconds at an altitude of 265 to 280 miles, for three to five days.

Their Fram2 mission website calls itself the first polar-orbit human spaceflight. The first Fram Arctic expedition under legendary Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen took three years in the late nineteenth century.

“Fram2 has two main goals: to be the first crew to view and capture the Earth’s polar regions from lowEarth orbit and conduct research to help advance humanity’s capabilities for long-range space exploration,” its factsheet says.

According to the Fram2 website, it will study a phenomenon known as STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) at an altitude of approximately 400–500 km above Earth’s atmosphere. The crew will also work with SpaceX on research to help towards long-duration spaceflight.

The research could be significant for space and polar scientists, satellite and telecommunications companies but also for militaries, said Bouffard, and “could change the game in terms of who’s got communications in the North and who doesn’t.”

Cryptic

Wang’s journey has been as mysterious as that of any crypto billionaire.

In a rare interview with the Times of MaltaWang said that he did not leave Tianjin until his early 20s. “Two decades on, he is set to become the first Maltese citizen in space,” according to the article published on March 6, 2025.

On his social media accounts, Wang says he has always loved space and expresses admiration for what he says is the individual freedoms possible with bitcoin. He has set up Starlink – Musk’s satellite communications system – at the North Pole and on Svalbard. Of Musk he has tweeted, “He is my god.”

Wang has said in a tweet that he used cryptocurrency to buy a passport in 2017 from the Caribbean nation and citizenship-by-investment destination of St. Kitts and Nevis. Social media images show he may have a South Korean identity document, and an apparently cancelled Chinese passport. In 2023, he acquired citizenship in Malta, a tiny European nation in the Mediterranean that is a member of the European Union and is known as a “golden passport” haven.

It’s unclear when Wang was last in China. A Chinese-language document on his X account, dated May 25, 2020, shows a cancelled Chinese hukou, the household registration that is essential for any Chinese citizen and resident. It lists his occupation as “unemployed.” The document says he is 180 centimetres tall and graduated from university – although in the interview with the Times of Malta he says he dropped out of college. He first reached out to SpaceX to discuss the possibility of buying a ticket to travel into space while in Malta, Wang said in the interview. He ended up buying an entire flight. The cost has not been made public, but NASA has paid about $55 million per seat for flights on Dragon, according to media reports.

Globetrotter

Wang is an incessant traveller. His X account says it is “Documenting my travel to every country/territory in the world following ISO 3166: 54% (135 of 249) on 1 planet/moon(s) done and counting…” referring to the international standard giving each country and subdivision a unique number. His social media shows travel from the Arctic to Antarctica — and to Afghanistan as soon as it opened for flights in 2023. His most frequent destination appears to be Thailand, which he says he has visited at least 100 times.

In early March Wang visited Reunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean where a cyclone forced him to spend the night at a bus stop, he said, before continuing via the Caribbean for final training prior to lift off.

Wang has pushed back against questions as to whether his constant travel and multiple passports make him suspicious.

“It is perfectly legal to travel with 6 passports, given all of them are under the same name and same DOB,” he said after being detained by New Zealand officials for nearly three hours, when customs officials “forced me to give them my passwords.”

“It is perfectly legal to travel with 5 mobile phones because I have 13 active phone numbers from 7 different countries; It is perfectly legal to fly 12 hours here, stay one night in a hotel, do nothing, and fly out because it is just my lifestyle,” Wang wrote on X.

No Ordinary Person

In a rare news article in the Chinese-language Foresight News Zhang Li, who says he worked for Wang in Beijing at F2Pool, wrote: “He is not an ordinary person.”

“He never wastes time on trivial matters. He has his own little world and is very focused on doing his own things,” Zhang wrote in the 2019 article, noting that this included coding and studying math and physics.

“Sometimes I say that some of his behaviors are really wilful, and he says yes, I am quite wilful. Later I think that it is better to say that he retains some childishness than wilfulness,” Zhang wrote.

Not even Wang’s colleagues appear to know how much he is worth. Zhang recounts that he asked Wang, who often hires private jets, why he doesn’t buy his own airplane. None of his employees knows how to manage an airplane, Wang replied.

“Listening to his explanation I was a bit surprised. I thought he’d say, ‘an airplane is too expensive,'” Zhang wrote.

Wild Crypto World

In the wild world of cryptocurrency, Wang has detractors as well as admirers. Mark Camilleri, an investigative journalist and cryptosleuth in Malta, has raised questions about Wang’s connections to Russia and China and whether he was serving their interests, in a series of articles where he also cited an online whistleblower, in the newspaper he edits, the Maltese Herald.

“The problem is that it is difficult to detect this stuff without massive research because all you will see in the bitcoin mining pool is a bunch of random bitcoin anonymous addresses,” Camilleri said in an email to Newsweek.

Asked to comment on allegations that he had been involved in fraud, Wang told Newsweek: “The allegations, hearsay and rumors others have shared about me online are both unsubstantiated and defamatory.”

Wang has associations with high-ranking people in Norway. Social media images show him and the cinematographer Mikkelsen with Mikkelsen’s fiancé and former special operations soldier Rolf-Harald Haugen. A selfie in an article in the Norwegian military’s Defense Forum publication shows Haugen in an informal setting with the head of Norway’s Armed Forces. Haugen did not respond to Newsweek‘s requests for comment.

But according to the Norwegian tax authorities, Wang’s official postal address is at an international hotel in St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, though he has had a residential address at a vacation apartment in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main town, that advertises for $577 a night.

Norway’s business registry shows that the Svalbard cinematography company owned by Mikkelsen, who will film from space undertakes a wide range of activities including natural sciences, engineering, development and “other research.” The company, O2XR (short for On 2 eXtended Reality,) is low-key.

“We always strive to be as transparent as possible, but it is common practice in business to respect confidentiality around projects and financial matters due to professional agreements and competitive considerations. For this reason, we are not in a position to share further details,” spokesperson Stig Karlsen told Newsweek in an email.