The Fighter: V Pappas and the Battle for TikTok’s Future

V Pappas awoke to the sound of dragons.

It had been one week since Pappas’ boss, Shou Zi Chew, was questioned for five grueling hours by members of Congress, and the chief operating officer of TikTok was enjoying their first vacation in months. (Pappas uses the pronouns they and them and recently changed their name to V from Vanessa.) They were sleeping in a jungle cabin in Costa Rica alongside their wife and two young children, when around 5 a.m., a cacophony erupted outside. The cabin was surrounded on all sides by howler monkeys—“the loudest mammal on the planet,” Pappas said, their infernal shrieks sounding exactly like the “Game of Thrones” dragons. (The primates actually inspired the Indominus rex calls in “Jurassic Park.”)

The wailing still echoing in their ears, the Pappas family took a hike through the jungle until they reached the ocean. While walking along the beach, Pappas and their wife, C.C.—who was a talent agent at Creative Artists Agency until 2019, when she left to become a doctor of eastern medicine and acupuncture—had a chance to reflect on something I’d asked Pappas the week before. During our first interview, held within a glass conference room inside TikTok’s Los Angeles offices, I wondered if Pappas had known the risks they were taking when they left mighty YouTube in 2018 for an obscure, newly Chinese-owned social video app.

“It was just such a hard decision, personally and professionally,” Pappas told me over a video call from their LA home a week after returning from Costa Rica. “I remember calling a bunch of my mentors at the time, and it was such a polarizing discussion to have. Half of them were on the side of, ‘Absolutely not, do not do this.’ And then the other half were like, ‘This is the best thing that you could do.’”

It’s hard, even now, to determine which side was right.