Triller Ghosted Its Own Workers for a Year — Then Announced a $400M SpaceX Bet

Eight employees at Triller — the short-video startup that raised over $400 million to challenge TikTok — say they haven't received a paycheck since June 2025, haven't heard from management in months, and were never formally fired or laid off. The company simply went silent: work emails were cut off in October, health insurance was suspended, and when one employee contacted payroll processor ADP about W-2 forms, they were told Triller had severed its relationship with the company entirely. Meanwhile, Triller remains publicly listed on the Nasdaq with a market cap of roughly $60 million.

The ghosted workers span marketing, events, sales, and communications. Some kept working for months after paychecks stopped, hoping for a turnaround. Others immediately began job hunting. Several have since filed wage claims with the California Labor Board or pursued legal action — six staffers filed a joint suit in Santa Barbara Superior Court in October alleging they're collectively owed around $280,000 in unpaid wages. Triller has not responded to the suit.

The meltdown is the culmination of years of erratic pivoting. Triller launched in 2015 as a hip-hop video app, recruited celebrity investors including Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, and The Weeknd, and made a splashy push during the 2020 TikTok scare — offering Charli D'Amelio a free leased Rolls-Royce and rent-free mansions to TikTok creators. It made a failed $20 billion offer to buy TikTok outright, which TikTok's PR team dismissed as "preposterous." When the ban didn't materialize, Triller pivoted hard into boxing (Mike Tyson, Jake Paul), acquiring the Verzuz rap-battle series for $26 million, a bare-knuckle fighting outfit called BKFC, and an AI marketing company. The M&A binge helped produce a net loss of over $700 million in 2021 on just $63 million in revenue. Its accumulated deficit reached $1.38 billion by end of 2025.

When TikTok's ban loomed again in early 2025, Triller mounted one final campaign to capture displaced users — then the ban evaporated, and so did the company's last real hope. Its app was quietly shut down. Social media and sports streaming revenue collapsed from $5 million in 2024 to zero in 2025. Its auditor flagged "substantial doubt" about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. In a particularly strange turn, one of Triller's own subsidiaries — its combat-sports streaming platform — sued the parent company in April, alleging abandonment during a financial crisis. A law professor described a subsidiary suing its parent as deeply abnormal and a signal that something is "badly amiss."

Now, rather than restructuring or winding down in any orderly way, Triller's CEO Wing-Fai Ng announced in late June that the company plans to acquire a "significant position" in SpaceX valued at over $400 million, to be held as a strategic treasury asset. The stock surged on the news — from $5 million market cap at the start of 2026 to roughly $60 million — even as the workers who built the company's earlier businesses remain unpaid and unacknowledged.