On January 9, TikTok’s most-followed human signed paperwork to take his business public through a Hong Kong financial printing outfit named Rich Sparkle Holdings. The sticker price was $975 million, payable in 75 million shares of stock. For three glorious weeks, Khaby Lame had the ticker symbol ANPA sitting right in his social media bios like an equity-funded badge of honor.
Then the ticker vanished from his bio. The stock followed it off the cliff.
At the time of the announcement, Rich Sparkle told the market it planned to build an AI avatar of Lame to run brand deals and hawk merchandise. It projected this synthetic silent comedian could drive "more than $4 billion in annual product sales." That projection did wonders for the printing firm's share price, which briefly vaulted to $180. A few months later, several brokerages had restricted trading in the shares, and the stock was sitting at $1.93. That is a 99 percent drop, which trimmed the theoretical value of Lame’s 75 million shares from $975 million to $145 million, assuming those shares ever actually materialize.
They probably will not. Rich Sparkle’s September 30 regulatory filing, its first formal word on the matter since March, noted that the merger remains entirely conditional on due diligence, stock-exchange approvals, and minimum valuation floors. It is the same boilerplate that sat in the original paperwork. Nobody has closed anything. Nobody has wired anything.
Someone did make out, though. Buried in that same September filing is the revelation that Rich Sparkle handed out nearly $39 million in share-based compensation to its staff during the six-month period ending March 31, generating an operating loss of nearly $40 million. In the exact same period a year earlier, that employee stock-comp line sat at zero. The filing does not name the lucky recipients or stamp the exact trading days they received the paper, but the timing is immaculate. While the public was chewing on the idea of a billion-dollar creator IPO, the print shop's payroll was busy getting equity during the single largest pricing bubble in the company's history.
Lame, for his part, has stopped talking about reverse mergers and gone back to the standard creator playbook. His recent dispatch includes an appearance in a James Bond video game, a brand ambassador gig for a travel eSIM company called Holafly, and promotional spots for the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games. A flat check for a travel app may not match the paper fiction of a $4 billion avatar empire, but at least the check clears in real currency.