Equity in a company that a celebrity or creator receives for promotion binds its holder to the company for better or worse, because it cannot be sold before the company is sold, goes public or buys the stake back. American football player Tom Brady received a stake in the crypto exchange FTX in 2021 as its ambassador. After the exchange collapsed in November 2022, he appeared in bankruptcy documents with more than 1.1 million shares and, as a shareholder, stood at the very back of the queue for payouts. Investors sued him and other promoters of the exchange.
Creators today receive equity for promotion, advice or other services instead of all or part of their fee. They usually do not put their own money into the company. In September 2026 the creator Cat Goetze, who has almost 900,000 followers on Instagram, became the first outside shareholder in the management firm Smooth Media. The five-year-old firm, which had no outside capital, represents her along with more than 70 other creators. Goetze is to advise it on its core business, new services and branding.
Goetze gives a percentage of her income only to people who understand the creator economy better than she does. Neither the company nor Goetze has disclosed the size of the stake. Smooth continues to take a commission on the deals it brings to its own co-owner.
Smooth chief executive Josh Kaplan considers feedback and ideas from creators one of the few things that will really help the company. Co-owner Goetze now has a reason to bring creators to the firm. “I’m incentivized to make that introduction because it will help them grow their portfolio of creators and therefore scale the company,” she told Scalable. Before, she might have hesitated over recommending the firm to friends, fearing that managers' attention would be split.
In August 2024 the British regulator ASA ruled misleading an ad by the company Zoe featuring Steven Bartlett, because it did not state that Bartlett was an investor in Zoe. In Czechia, an influencer endorsement in which the consumer cannot tell that it is an ad is an unfair commercial practice. The Act on the Regulation of Advertising prohibits such advertising. The European Commission has announced the Digital Fairness Act for the fourth quarter of 2026, which is meant to address, among other things, misleading influencer marketing.
The shopping app Driptail, one of the startups that offer creators equity, let creators in as strategic investors. An investment fund vetted them beforehand. According to Driptail founder and chief executive Mark Weinberger, equity works as a filter for transactional creators who are only after quick earnings.
The creator Maddy Gustini, who received equity in Driptail, sees a large part of creator work as very transactional. She is drawn to ownership and a share in the long-term growth of a company into which she puts her time, audience and knowledge.
The money from equity comes only with an exit
A creator profits from long-term growth when the company is sold or goes public, which can take years or never happen at all. Since 2022, 70% of venture-backed startup exits have been valued below what investors put into them, PitchBook calculated in 2024. In the third quarter of 2026 only 18 US venture-backed companies went public.
Until the company goes public or is sold, a creator's stake can be diluted by another funding round if the contract has no anti-dilution protection. A creator usually gains equity gradually. For startup employees, the initial period, the so-called cliff, usually lasts a full year. For a purely advisory role, the platform Cherub recommends two-year vesting and a three-month cliff. Whoever leaves the deal before the cliff generally gets nothing.
The cap table in times of trouble and after an exit
According to Scalable, both sides of the deal bear the reputational risk, and a brand finds it harder to part with a creator who sits out the cliff and then gets into trouble, because the creator is on its cap table. In May 2025 a federal judge dismissed 12 of the 14 claims in the investors' suit against Brady and other FTX promoters.
The court kept two claims based on state laws on unregistered securities and, for the others, allowed that the plaintiffs may amend them and sue the celebrities again. According to the judge, the investors did not plausibly show that the celebrities knew about the FTX fraud, although he described them as “uninformed, negligent, or even reckless” in promoting the exchange.
“I don’t want to just have equity in 20 random companies where I’m basically just a spokesperson,” Gustini said about equity for promotion. According to the same source, the creator Alix Earle plans to invest in roughly five or six brands whose products she uses regularly.
In 2024 Earle received equity in the drinks brand Poppi as part of her fee for a collaboration. In May 2024 she told her followers that she had invested in Poppi, and the caption of her TikTok video carried the hashtags #proudinvestor and #poppipartner. In May 2025 the brand was acquired by the PepsiCo group, and Earle profited from the sale thanks to her stake.
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