I remember a large stake heading to the exchanges a couple of years ago. In the region of 45m STEEM which at the time, I believe the price was high so would've returned Justin's investment? I think I talked to you about it at the time so it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility.

I believe that was the "undisputed STEEM" from this lawsuit. i.e. Part of the STEEM that was withdrawn to @community321 during HF23 and subsequently sent off to Bittrex. I think I understood it at the time, but forget details now, but basically, there were two "chunks" of Steem. One chunk was in dispute between Steemit and the plaintiffs. The other chunk was only claimed by Steemit. But Bittrex was holding all of it. At some point in the process, Bittrex made an "interpleader deposit" in USD which covered the value of the disputed chunk. Then, they returned the undisputed STEEM to Steemit. I assume that Bittrex became the owners of the the 9/10 million disputed STEEM when they funded the interpleader deposit with the court.

When Steemit got the undisputed STEEM, they sent it off to a different exchange (Is that binance?). 14 million STEEM came in from Bittrex, then 20 million went out. The price at the time was $0.19 according to coingecko, so that value would be about $3.8 million.

That was directed by this order:

So, that would have been STEEM that JS already technically owned. I always assumed that was funding operations and/or paying for the TRX rewards, but I'm not sure. The total amount (disputed + undisputed) was just shy of 24 million STEEM (and a settlement was eventually reached for the "disputed STEEM" or the value thereof.).

I agree about cardboard. I think he was referring to when JS "stepped away" from Tron Foundation, but I'm nearly certain that Steemit was still owned by the Tron Foundation after that, so it looks like an accounting thing to me.

If Steemit Inc. was a UK company, my first port of call would be Companies House to look at registration details and accounts. Is there a US equivalent that has free access?

I've got a busy couple of days so probably won't have time to dig any deeper than you have.

I'm sure there's an equivalent, but I'm not curious enough to chase it down, and I doubt if they'd have free access. Based on the lack of supporting evidence, I'm strongly suspecting that "J.M." is a mistake of some sort on the part of that website.

Yeah, I wondered about @brucemeerkat, too. Tron or Steemit account, I guess.

Another interesting thing that I learned today is that one of Steemit's initial investors in 2016 was (apparently) from China. Not that it means anything, but it surprised me.