Rich Sparkle said it bought Lame’s company in January. A later SEC filing still described the acquisition as conditional, while the buyer’s stock lost more than 90% from its peak.
In January, headlines said Khaby Lame had sold his company for $975 million. That description left out two important details.
Lame was not receiving $975 million in cash. The proposed buyer, Rich Sparkle Holdings, agreed to pay entirely with its own shares. More troubling, documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after Rich Sparkle announced the acquisition as completed still described the transaction as subject to conditions.
The clarification is key because the deal became the biggest financial claim attached to Lame’s career.
The Senegal-born Italian creator built more than 160 million TikTok followers by saying almost nothing. Five years after losing a factory job during the pandemic, his image was being valued in a transaction approaching $1 billion.
Forbes estimated his creator earnings at $20 million in 2025 and $9.9 million for its 2026 ranking, with commercial partners including Hugo Boss and Binance.
The $975 million was something else entirely.
What the deal actually said
On January 9, Rich Sparkle filed an agreement with the SEC to acquire all of Step Distinctive Limited, a British Virgin Islands company connected to Lame’s commercial business.
The agreed consideration was $975 million.
Rich Sparkle would issue 75 million new shares, valued for the transaction at $13 each, to the owners of Step Distinctive. Lame directly held 5% of Step Distinctive and controlled another 44% through Dominant Action Limited, a company in which he owned 95%, according to the filing.
The deal would have transformed the ownership of Rich Sparkle itself.
Before the proposed acquisition, the company had about 15.1 million shares outstanding, according to its March prospectus.
Issuing another 75 million shares to buy Step Distinctive would have handed most of the enlarged company to the sellers. Because the transaction could change control of the Nasdaq-listed company, Rich Sparkle said it needed to satisfy Nasdaq’s requirements for an initial listing connected to the deal.
The agreement also contained conditions.
Step Distinctive had to receive a valuation of at least $900 million satisfactory to Rich Sparkle. Due diligence had to be completed. Stock-exchange approval was required for the consideration shares.
Two days after signing the agreement, Rich Sparkle issued a press release saying the acquisition had been completed.
Its later regulatory filings told a less settled story.
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Rich Sparkle was a financial-printing company
The identity of the buyer drew scrutiny almost immediately. Rich Sparkle had listed on Nasdaq only six months earlier. Its operating business was not entertainment, creator management or social commerce.
It provided financial printing, typesetting, translation and related services to companies in Hong Kong.
Forbes reported that Rich Sparkle had less than $6 million in revenue for 2024 and had gone public at $4 a share with an implied enterprise value of about $50 million.
Then came a proposed $975 million purchase of a business built around the world’s most-followed TikTok creator.
The numbers attracted securities lawyers and investors.
Rich Sparkle’s share price surged more than 650% after the announcement, reaching $180.64 on January 15. Forbes calculated that the company’s market capitalisation briefly reached $16.3 billion when the enlarged share count implied by the deal was taken into account.
The rise did not last.
By March 19, Rich Sparkle shares were trading at $8.69, according to an SEC prospectus. By April, TheWrap reported the company at $8.52 a share, down more than 90% from its January high.
The SEC filing still called the deal conditional
The most important contradiction appeared after Rich Sparkle had publicly declared the transaction complete.
In a prospectus dated March 30, the company again described the January agreement as a transaction under which it “intends to purchase” Step Distinctive.
The document repeated the conditions covering valuation, due diligence and stock-exchange approval. It did not describe the acquisition as completed.
Forbes had already noted in January that Rich Sparkle had not filed a subsequent SEC report confirming completion. Securities attorney Brenda Hamilton told the publication that this could mean the company had missed a filing deadline or that the transaction had not yet gone through.
By April, it was reported that Lame had removed Rich Sparkle’s ANPA stock ticker from his TikTok and Instagram profiles. The publication also found no filing showing that the 75 million shares promised under the transaction had been issued to Step Distinctive’s owners.
Neither point proves the deal was formally terminated.
They do mean the $975 million should not be reported as though Lame received that amount or as though the transaction proceeded exactly as announced.
The AI version of Khaby was part of the sales pitch
Rich Sparkle’s plan was not limited to conventional sponsorships.
Its January announcement proposed using Lame’s likeness to develop an AI version of the creator that could produce multilingual content and appear in livestream commerce across different time zones.
The company presented his hundreds of millions of followers as the customer base for a much larger e-commerce operation. It projected that sales connected to the model could eventually reach $4 billion a year. That was Rich Sparkle’s forecast, not existing revenue.
The idea depended heavily on what made Lame unusual in the first place.
His videos require little translation. He became famous for silently mocking unnecessarily complicated life hacks, usually ending with the same open-handed gesture. The format crossed national and linguistic boundaries with very little adaptation.
Lame was born in Dakar in 2000 and moved to Italy as a child. He became an Italian citizen in 2022 after spending most of his life there.
