Triller workers say they were ghosted for a year

Triller workers – Employees at Triller, the Nasdaq-listed short-video company that has pivoted repeatedly, say they haven’t received pay in the past year, had work emails shut off, and saw health insurance suspended—even though they believe they were never formally fired. The d

For months, eight Triller employees say they’ve been left in a kind of corporate limbo—no paycheck for the past year, no messages from their managers for months, and work emails that were later turned off.

They describe a shutdown that didn’t come with the usual paperwork. They say they have not received termination emails and have not been invited to ominous HR meetings. Instead, they were simply cut off. Marketing, events, and sales staffers described the same missing pieces: missed pay and silence.

“One staffer who worked on its events business said, “My involvement at Triller is the most bizarre, mind-boggling experience I’ve had.” “No communication. No, ‘You’re fired.’”

Another employee, who worked on communications, put it more bluntly: “I have not left the company, the company has left me.”

Triller has not responded to requests for comments.

Behind the scenes. the company’s financial story is moving in parallel—sometimes in ways the employees struggle to reconcile with what they’re living. In company filings, Triller said it halved its head count from 288 workers in December 2024 to 144 in December 2025. It is unclear how, or whether, the employees in limbo are reflected in that figure.

When one employee tried to find an answer from outside the company, they turned to payroll. The worker asked Triller’s payroll processor, ADP, whether they would receive W-2 forms for the 2025 tax year. An ADP representative told them that Triller had cut off services with the company. according to an email viewed by Business Insider.

The situation sharpened when payroll stopped. Some employees said they kept working for a few months after payroll ended, still hoping for a turnaround. Others stopped sooner and began looking for other jobs. When work emails shut off in October, several employees said it became clear they couldn’t continue their work.

The disputes that follow a silent exit have now become legal and procedural. A handful of employees have filed wage claims with the California Labor Board or sued Triller. alleging they are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. In one lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Barbara in October. six staffers say they are collectively owed around $280. 000. Triller has not responded to the suit in court.

For the employees waiting, the question is not only money—it’s whether anything will ever come to an end.

One communications staffer described the fear of what can happen when a company stops paying without explanation: “It just all seems insane to me that there’s no repercussions for this. At any point, I could have been like, ‘What is the worst thing that could happen?. The company could disappear, and they could ghost us forever?’ That actually happened.”.

Triller, still trading on Nasdaq—still staking big

The strange part, the employees say, is that Triller has not gone out of business. It remains a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq.

In late June. Triller announced it plans to acquire a “significant position” in SpaceX. priced at over $400 million. to be held as a “strategic treasury asset” on its balance sheet. Triller’s stock jumped on the news. Its market capitalization was about $60 million at Thursday’s market close, up from $5 million at the start of 2026.

That contrast—between corporate expansion plans and personal payroll collapse—lands with employees as a rupture they can’t fully explain.

The ghosting isn’t an isolated moment. It comes after years of pivots as Triller tried to build a viable business model in the shadow of short-video giants.

Founded in 2015 as a music-focused video app that found traction in the hip-hop community. Triller later drew celebrity attention and major investor names. PitchBook called it a “treasure trove of dance and lip sync videos. many of which highlight the hottest new hip-hop.” In late 2019. it announced investments totaling more than $10 million from artists and music executives including Lil Wayne. Pitbull. and Marshmello.

The hope that shaped Triller’s strategy was that the rest of the market could swing in its direction. After TikTok was banned in India in 2020 and topped app charts in some countries. Triller bet that a similar outcome could happen in the United States. It also pursued a bid to buy TikTok for $20 billion through a financing arrangement with the asset-management firm Centricus. TikTok’s spokespeople at the time called the bid “preposterous” and asked, “What’s Triller?” when Bloomberg covered it.

Donald Trump Jr. endorsed the app in 2020 as an “option that you can go to that’s an American company that’s not saving your data, that’s not going to eventually weaponize it against your children.”

As Triller tried to look like the obvious successor to TikTok, it staged events and signed high-profile creators. It recruited stars including Charli D’Amelio and Josh Richards as spokespeople and offered equity. fancy titles. rent-free mansions. and in D’Amelio’s case a free leased Rolls-Royce. “Triller captured the moment,” said one staffer who worked on its marketing efforts at the time. “There were branded parties. a Jake Paul watch party. a movie premiere for ‘Space Jam 2’ — there was always something happening.”.

Even employees in marketing say some of those moves surprised their own teams.

In 2020. six former employees told Business Insider that the company had announced monthly active user numbers more than five times those shown on some internal dashboards. Triller’s CEO at the time said the workers were “disseminating inaccurate information” and it could “validate each and every one of our 239M plus” users.

TikTok survived. Triller kept changing.

When a U.S. TikTok ban failed to materialize in 2020, Triller shifted toward other growth plans. It expanded into sports by hosting boxing matches between Mike Tyson, Roy Jones Jr., Jake Paul, and Ben Askren, featuring performances from artists including Justin Bieber and Doja Cat.

In 2021, it went on a company-buying spree. Triller offered $10 million in cash and about $16 million in equity to acquire the Verzuz rap-battle video series from Timbaland and Swizz Beatz. It also bought other businesses including a combat-sports streaming app, a fight club called BKFC, and an AI marketing company.

The acquisition push contributed to a major balance-sheet hit. Triller reported a net loss of over $700 million in 2021 on revenue of around $63 million. Its financial troubles deepened, and its accumulated deficit reached about $1.38 billion at the end of 2025, according to company filings.

Tuhin Roy. Triller’s former president of business operations who joined in late 2020 to help with operations and investment strategy. described the problem as a lack of planning behind dealmaking: “You had really good deal makers with a lot of cash to make deals. but there just was not the forward planning that would enable them to safely execute. ” Roy said. “It was as if they thought the spigot of money would continue indefinitely and they would be able to raise whatever they needed whenever they needed it. And at some point, the music stops. Any company that pursues that growth strategy gets into trouble at some point.”.

When Triller sought to go public to raise more money, it tried to connect its separate businesses into a single story for investors.

The communications staffer described it this way: “They wanted to seem like everything was meant to work together in some ways, for investors.” The staffer said the company promoted “Triller One,” describing it as an internal concept about everything coming together with shared resources.

Money problems spread before the latest cutoffs

The missing paycheck described by employees fits into an earlier pattern. Before Triller cut off pay last year, the eight employees said the company was having issues paying them on time.

Delayed payments also hurt other partners. In 2022, the namesake app lost access to popular songs after failing to pay music licensing partners. That year, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz sued Triller, alleging it owed $28 million in missed payments tied to their acquisition. The company settled by increasing the performers’ ownership stakes in Triller.

Triller’s filings say it owes millions of dollars in settlements or arbitration awards to partners including Sony Music Entertainment. Samsung Electronics. and the events company Epic Sports & Entertainment. It could owe millions more if it loses lawsuits from other companies, including its former Los Angeles landlord.

A last push to beat TikTok fades—then the app stops

Triller went public in late 2024 via a reverse merger with a Hong Kong firm called AGBA. In that process. it said it was beginning a “transformation journey.” Cole McMannus. who served as Triller’s senior director of technology. said the expected cash never arrived: “I thought we were going to get a big influx of money. We were going to pay our bills. We were going to have some working capital,” McMannus said. “None of those things ended up happening for us.”.

In January 2025, Triller made another push based on the hope that TikTok might face a ban again. It launched a website encouraging TikTok users to download videos and reupload them to Triller. When TikTok was restored and the Trump administration signaled plans to rescue the app. it felt like the fight was over. four staffers said.

“In my head, this was our last chance,” one staffer said. “Then the ban fell apart.”

A few months later, Triller’s app stopped working. Triller later said it shut down the app because it had not “evolved enough to justify continued cash burn.”

Revenue collapse followed. Triller’s revenue from social media and sports streaming fell from around $5 million in 2024 to $0 in 2025. The company also makes money from AGBA’s financial services business. which existed before the merger. but employees and filings indicate it wasn’t enough to offset losses.

An auditor warning arrived in April. The auditor wrote in an April filing that there was “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. ” citing working capital deficits. recurring losses. and limited cash resources. Triller was delisted from the Nasdaq in December for delinquent filings. but was reinstated in April after being given a chance to trade and meet the exchange’s $1 minimum share price.

Corporate disputes intensify

The company is now entangled in internal legal pressure as well. In April, Triller was sued by one of its own companies. The complaint. filed by the team behind its combat-sports streaming platform. said Triller leadership abandoned it in late 2025 when it was in financial distress and becoming “insolvent and on the brink of no longer being a going concern.”.

Benjamin Means. a law professor at the University of South Carolina. called it “highly abnormal” for a subsidiary to sue its parent: “That’s not a normal corporate governance feature. ” Means said. “If the board of the subsidiary feels compelled to take that step, it sounds like there’s something badly amiss.”.

Triller describes a strategic reset—employees describe a wait

Triller says it is now in the middle of a strategic reset. In prepared materials for its annual general meeting in June. the company wrote that it is retreating from some legacy businesses. looking to salvage parts it says are working. including its boxing business. BKFC. It also wants to move into new media categories such as micro dramas and casino-style digital games.

The company also plans to own SpaceX shares as a “strategic treasury asset.” In connection with that deal, Triller CEO Wing-Fai Ng said of the SpaceX transaction: “This is the beginning of the next chapter. Several additional recapitalization initiatives are underway.”

For the employees who say they have waited for a year for answers on missed pay, those corporate plans don’t solve the immediate human problem: what happens to their unpaid wages, and what role—if any—they still have inside the company.

They are still trying to get updates. They are still trying to understand whether there will ever be a resolution.

And in the gap between public filings and private silence, the question has become simple and painful: how does a publicly traded company keep moving forward while workers describe being left behind without the basic communication that usually follows a payroll collapse?

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