Rap Videos, Crypto, and Litigation: Inside the Rise and Fall of Galaxy Gas
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n July 16, a restaurant in the Atlanta suburb of College Park, Georgia, posted a video on their Instagram account that was viewed over 38 million times before it was taken down. In the clip’s opening seconds, a young-looking customer in a black ski mask and blue hoodie twists the nozzle and inhales from a long, colorful canister of nitrous oxide. His voice sounds cartoonishly pitched down from the gas when he tells the person behind the camera, “My name Lil Tae, man.” In the weeks after the video was posted, Lil Tae became a meme; people on TikTok imitated his voice in parodies, edited in Goku from Dragon Ball Z, and made a Roblox reenactment of the original video. In a post that racked up over five million views on TikTok, one user shared a fake announcement claiming Lil Tae had died from inhaling “to [sic] much Galaxy Gas.”
Over the phone from Atlanta, Lil Tae tells me he went to jail over an unrelated incident a week after the restaurant posted the video. When the 18-year-old got out around a month later, his phone was full of memes and messages asking if he was still alive. He first heard about Galaxy Gas, the brand name clearly visible on the side of the nitrous oxide canister he’s holding in the video, earlier that summer when his friend started doing it. Though the video seems like a stunt, Lil Tae says it happened spontaneously. “I forgot I had it right here with me,” he says. “I ain’t plan to do that or nothing.” He doesn’t mind the memes (“Shit’s funny”), or that he seems to have become the face of Galaxy Gas (“I ain’t tripping”) though he says he no longer uses it.
In the wake of the Lil Tae video, Galaxy Gas took on a viral life of its own. Videos of kids passing out after taking long hits from the nozzles quickly went viral (in some cases, demonstrating just how viral Galaxy Gas had become, videos of users inhaling other brands of nitrous were erroneously labeled as Galaxy Gas in social media captions). So, too, did a wave of videos denouncing Galaxy Gas, calling out the fact that their nitrous canisters were for sale on Amazon, and questioning why the trend seemed to be so specifically impacting young Black kids in Atlanta. A narrative began to develop; “The CIA put Galaxy Gas in Atlanta the same way they put crack in LA,” rapper Retch wrote on Twitter. SZA tweeted out a question: “Is no one gonna talk about how galaxy gas came out of no where and is being MASS marketed to black children?”
Outrage over the trend only added fuel to its memeified trajectory. In an era of rage-bait, where engagement is more explicitly tied to dollars earned on social media platforms than ever, the incentive to go viral has never been more alluring. For teenagers with access to social platforms, a whole new lexicon has developed around “brain rot,” which refers to the deterioration of one’s mind after being chronically online. The term “brain rot” was even named this year’s Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary. Galaxy Gas quickly emerged as one of the year’s biggest brain rot trends, as filming oneself taking hits of the brand’s brightly colored canisters briefly offered a surefire way to boost engagement.
As far as drugs go, nitrous — also known as “whippets,” “hippie crack,” and quite a few other names — isn’t a new phenomenon. From Grateful Dead shows to the dawn of the rave scene, people have been inhaling the gas to get high for decades. It might bring to mind dorm room floors littered with balloons or the infamous footage of Steve-O going through canister after canister from a 2009 MTV documentary about the Jackass star’s struggles with substance abuse. But, over the last few years, whippets have steadily become a drug of choice in rap. In 2020, Atlanta stars Young Thug and Gunna shared pictures and videos of themselves in the studio holding whipped cream dispensers. Just last August, Kanye West’s former chief of staff and right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, alleged that West’s nitrous oxide addiction was costing the rapper more than $50,000 a month.
Inhaling nitrous oxide provides a brief, euphoric high that can include dizziness, giggling, and hallucinations and usually lasts for a few minutes. Long-term recreational use can lead to neurological, blood-related, and psychological complications; inhaling the gas straight from a canister can also lead to frostbite and tissue damage, which is why recreational users often inhale whippets from balloons to regulate the temperature of the gas.
Over the last few years, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have banned the possession and sale of nitrous outside of medical contexts. In the United States, possession of nitrous oxide is legal under federal law and only subject to federal regulation from the Food and Drug Administration. But many states have laws regulating the possession and sale to minors, and in May, after a number of nitrous-related deaths in the state in recent years, Louisiana passed a law banning the sale of nitrous oxide altogether.
Galaxy Gas claims their products are for “culinary food use only” on their website, but the differences between their product and whippets of generations past are the size of the canisters (as large as 3.3 liters), the alluring flavors like “Vanilla Cupcake” and “Blue Raspberry,” and the bright, eye-catching labels. According to the company’s website, which is still live, Galaxy Gas was founded in the metro Atlanta area in 2021. Georgia state business records show that Galaxy Gas shares a business address with SBK International, a wholesale distributor of smoke shop products, and a number of Cloud 9 Smoke & Vape stores, a Georgia-based smoke shop franchise. On September 3rd, lawyers representing the estate of a 78-year-old man who was hit by a car while riding his bike in a northern suburb of Atlanta and died from his injuries a week later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Galaxy Gas, SBK International, and the Cloud 9 Smoke Co. shop where they say the driver purchased a canister of Galaxy Gas, before inhaling the nitrous, losing consciousness behind the wheel, and hitting their client. Three days after the lawsuit was filed, the owners of Galaxy Gas shut down the company.
Lawyers for both SBK, Cloud 9 and Galaxy Gas have denied any wrongdoing. “The unlawful misuse of nitrous oxide products poses a serious health hazard,” the company said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned about the recent news reports and social media posts of individuals illegally misusing nitrous oxide products.”
“That’s how people looked at it: We’re just doing a job.”
In prior interviews, Ben and Sammy Amor have said their father, Khalil Amor, who worked at an Atlanta area GM dealership when they were kids, guided their path into entrepreneurship. “He never really told us, “You need to go make a resume or go get a job,” Ben Amor said in a 2019 interview. “It was, “Go create a job.” In 2011, when Ben Amor was a freshman at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, his parents opened a hookah lounge just a five-minute drive from his college. They began selling shisha and tobacco in the lounge, and soon after, Ben and Sammy Amor opened up their first Cloud 9 smoke shop across the street. The company has continued to expand ever since. The Cloud 9 website touts over 52 locations in Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. “I’ve always wanted to be like McDonald’s,” Ben Amor said in another 2019 interview with a business-focused podcast called HSTL UP. “You know what you’re going to expect.”
In 2015, the family started their next venture: a wholesale distribution business called SBK International — named for the three brothers, Sammy, Ben, and Karim — which would supply smoke shop products for all their Cloud 9 stores and their competitors. The Amors filed trademarks around several other smoke shop products that were manufactured by third parties, branded by the Amors, and then sold in their Cloud 9 stores, including MOB Glass (pipes and bongs) and Long Beach Hemp Co (CBD tinctures and other CBD products), according to the wrongful death lawsuit. In the complaint, lawyers for the plaintiff list a number of other intermediary companies allegedly owned by the Amors, which share business addresses with some of their other companies.
In the Georgia state filing for the Galaxy Gas LLC in October 2021, Khalil Amor, who is also listed as CEO and CFO of multiple Cloud 9 stores, is listed as the registered agent for the company. Because “the Amor family have not maintained the legal and financial separateness of the corporate form between the various interrelated entities they have created,” the plaintiffs argue in the complaint, “this Court should disregard the separate identity of these related and commingled entities, pierce the corporate veil, and treat Galaxy Gas, SBK International, and Cloud 9 Smoke & Vape as alter egos of one another.” (In an email to Rolling Stone, Khalil Amor denies ever owning any “ownership stake or operational control” in Galaxy Gas and says that none of his sons have ever been the owners of Galaxy Gas. “Registered agency does not equate at all to legal ownership,” he writes).
In response to a list of questions, a legal representative for Ben Amor, SBK International, and Cloud 9 issued a cease and desist letter to Rolling Stone and denied that Ben Amor, Cloud 9, or SBK have ever owned Galaxy Gas. “It is clear that Cloud 9 and SBK are being conflated, perhaps intentionally, with Galaxy Gas to capitalize on some recent negative media attention that Galaxy Gas has received,” they write. “These are and have always been separate legal entities. Cloud 9, SBK, and Ben Amor have never owned an interest, controlling or otherwise, in Galaxy Gas. The sum total of the relationship is that SBK was once a distributor, and Cloud 9 was once a retail seller of certain Galaxy Gas products.”
When Maynard Krakue was hired as a picker in the SBK International warehouse in August 2022, he didn’t know much about nitrous oxide and wasn’t familiar with the recreational culture around it, but his co-workers educated him on the product the company was selling; someone even showed him the Steve-O video. Generally, Krakue says, like many workplaces, there was a clock-in and clock-out mentality. “You work for Amazon — people don’t like Amazon — but it’s a job,” Krakue says. “That’s how people looked at it: We’re just doing a job.”
Another former SBK International employee, who was laid off and spoke anonymously for fear of retribution, remembers overhearing calls that were coming into the Galaxy Gas customer support line from people who “couldn’t form complete sentences” and were evidently using the nitrous oxide canisters recreationally. The former employee believes that the majority of the employees in the office knew how Galaxy Gas was primarily being used “to the point that some of these calls were on speakerphone and people were laughing at it.”
In 2022, the Amor brothers opened another warehouse to store Galaxy Gas and prepare orders, and Krakue eventually began working in the new space. When a new shipment of Galaxy Gas came in, which usually meant more than 10,000 canisters of nitrous oxide at a time, the team in the warehouse would sometimes prepare up to 20 orders in a day. “Sometimes there’d be so many pallets of gas we couldn’t even walk around,” Krakue says. Krakue and one other former employee say that the nitrous oxide tanks were being manufactured in China. The representative for Ben Amor, SBK, and Cloud 9 declined to comment on where Galaxy Gas was manufactured.
A former employee with knowledge of the company’s shipping operations says it was common for Galaxy Gas to do “millions of dollars a month” in sales. In their multiple years working at the company, this former employee doesn’t remember seeing an order come in from a culinary institution. Krakue says he delivered orders to restaurants “a couple of times.” Jesse Sands, another former employee — who worked in the warehouse and delivered orders for Galaxy Gas before losing his job — says he remembers delivering to “two or three” restaurants. Most of the other orders came from smoke shops, gas stations, and other wholesale distributors – not just in Georgia but all around the country.
Krakue, Sands, and another former SBK employee I spoke with say it was common to see Ben Amor carrying a canister of Galaxy Gas while at work. “He’s in his office, you walk by, and he’s got the tank in his hand talking to somebody,” Krakue says. “You could tell he liked it.” Sands says he saw Ben Amor inhaling from a canister of Galaxy Gas during a meeting with Cloud 9 franchise owners, while another former employee says they witnessed him doing whippets and offering whippets to other employees in a staff meeting.
In response to these allegations made by former employees, the legal representative for Ben Amor, SBK, and Cloud 9 writes: “Mr. Amor has never used nitrous oxide at SBK or in any other place of employment, before or during a business meeting, or in the presence of any employee of SBK. Any SBK employees who claim to have witnessed this behavior are lying, plain and simple.”
In March 2023, the company began posting video recipes for “strawberry mousse” and “vanilla cupcake nitro cold brew,” made with their nitrous oxide tanks, on the Galaxy Gas YouTube channel. This content push closely coincided with the company starting to sell its nitrous oxide tanks on Amazon, which didn’t require ID to purchase the gas (a representative for Amazon did not respond to a request for comment). Culinary recipes were posted regularly on the Galaxy Gas website, beginning in August 2021 when the company launched. A former SBK employee says they remember Sammy Amor telling them that the recipes and YouTube videos were being made specifically to cover legalities. Meanwhile, the company had begun promoting Galaxy Gas through social media ads; one user on X shared a screenshot of a Galaxy Gas ad from the beginning of 2024 with the caption, “Anytime is Party time!”
Over a year later, Krakue says he saw ads for Galaxy Gas on his own Facebook, and friends who had worked with him at the company began sending him Galaxy Gas memes. “You couldn’t keep the genie in the bottle,” Krakue says. As Galaxy Gas was going viral in August 2024, Krakue and his co-workers would often discuss the ongoing conversation around Galaxy Gas online and wait for the other shoe to drop. “Even though it was getting all this attention, I still expected them to keep selling it,” he says. Then, Krakue says, in the first week of September, staff members started hearing rumors about a lawsuit against the company; they were instructed to keep the doors to the warehouse closed, not to speak to any reporters that came by, and to keep working.
About two weeks later, with just one day of notice, Krakue says that word came through to his boss that the warehouse would be shutting down. The Amor brothers pulled every tank of Galaxy Gas from their Cloud 9 stores and brought it back to the warehouse where, Krakue says, the directions from their supervisor were to sort through the rest of the stock so it could be sold. The next day, they were told not to worry about the rest of the tanks — the Galaxy Gas warehouse was closed.
In a statement to CBS, Megan Paquin, a representative for Galaxy Gas, said the company stopped selling on September 19 “out of an abundance of caution due to the social media trend.” Their store on Amazon has also been shut down and other online retailers list the tanks as either “out of stock,” or they’ve been deleted. Galaxy Gas, once a lucrative part of the Amor’s business, is now owned by the Chinese company that is also Galaxy Gas’ manufacturer, according to a source with knowledge of the company’s recent legal proceedings. However, Paquin told CBS in October that Galaxy Gas was owned by a Delaware-based company called Pluto Brands, LLC. But she now says Galaxy Gas is not owned by Pluto Brands and declined to share information about the current owners.
In a statement provided to Rolling Stone, Paquin writes: “While Galaxy Gas has been the focus of many news reports and social media videos, many of the videos show individuals misusing other, unrelated nitrous oxide products. Galaxy Gas is neither the only nor the largest nitrous oxide brand.”
“In addition to traditional culinary use, Galaxy Gas is sold in smoke shops and sex shops as an erotic novelty,” according to Paquin’s statement. “Customers use Galaxy Gas to make flavorful whipped cream lubricants for their pleasure.”
Galaxy Gas may already be moving past its moment as a viral fad online, but the company’s legal battle is ongoing. In the complaint from the September 3 wrongful death lawsuit, lawyers representing the family of the man who passed away allege that the Amor family created Galaxy Gas “for the specific purpose of exploiting a substantial and burgeoning illicit market for the recreational use of nitrous oxide.” The complaint lists numerous cases dating back to 2009 of drivers around the country causing injury and harm after inhaling nitrous oxide.
Over the phone, and in their lawsuit, one of the lawyers for the plaintiff says that he believes the network of businesses the Amors owned and used to distribute Galaxy Gas may make it hard for them to argue they were completely unaware how Galaxy Gas was being used: “I would submit that it’s common sense that when you’re making a giant canister of nitrous that’s flavored, with smiley faces on the can, especially with all the viral stuff out there on it, that you know damn well it’s being sold for illicit use as the manufacturer.” The legal representative for Ben Amor, SBK International, and Cloud 9 declined to comment on the pending lawsuit.
A lawyer for Galaxy Gas, SBK International, and Cloud 9 has responded to the lawsuit in court with filings that deny all claims of liability and deny all wrongdoing. “Neither Cloud 9 Smoke Co. nor SBK International, LLC have ever marketed or sold nitrous oxide products for unlawful use or misuse, which was strictly prohibited under their terms of use and conditions of sale at the time Galaxy Gas products were sold,” Paquin said in a statement.
“Even though it was getting all this attention, I still expected them to keep selling it,”
On September 5, a day before the Amors terminated the Galaxy Gas business license, a 17-year-old Atlanta rapper named Rudekays released a music video for a song called “Whippets.” In the video, which has just over 175,000 views, Rudekays and his friends walk around a shopping center, each carrying large tanks of Galaxy Gas and intermittently inhaling from the nozzles. Rudekays plays up the theme for the camera, at one point inhaling from two Galaxy Gas tanks at the same time and, later, inhaling from two tanks while he has another tank stuffed in his jeans. While he doesn’t explicitly mention Galaxy Gas in the song, which is set to the same beat as Atlanta rapper Sahbabii’s 2017 track “Marsupial Superstars,” Rudekays does rap lines like “Fuck the hoe from the back off the whippet” and “Eat the pussy off the whippet, bet I lick it.”
Before the “Whippet” music video, Rudekays had been posting videos of himself with Galaxy Gas tanks on his TikTok throughout August. But his preview of the music video on X, which has 13.8 million views and counting, far surpassed the numbers of any of his previous clips. In the days after the music video’s release, he posted more videos on X with similar viral results. In one video, he appears to pass out after inhaling from a Galaxy Gas tank; in another video, he films a woman doing a whippet and then asks, “You ready to suck dick now?” In multiple video captions and in response to his viral tweets, he began writing “$GG.”
Over FaceTime, Rudekays explains that $GG is a cryptocurrency — a meme coin — and the “GG” stands for Galaxy Gas. These coins are tied to online trends, where people buying the cryptocurrency are essentially betting on a meme’s viral trajectory. They’ve gained popularity in recent years thanks to the visibility of irony-fueled cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, which Elon Musk has shilled to his social media followers and has a market cap — the total value of all the existing coins — of over $57 billion. While other meme coins like Shiba Inu and Pepe have also had longevity and risen to market caps in the billions, many of these coins — like the memes they’re named after — are fleeting.
Over the last year, celebrities like Lil Pump, Iggy Azalea, and Andrew Tate have all launched their own meme coins. Some celebrities have been accused of operating pump-and-dump schemes with their coins, using their social media following to artificially inflate the value of these coins before cashing in their large holdings and rendering the coins worthless. Over the last three years, the SEC has charged Kim Kardashian, Jake Paul, Lindsay Lohan, and others for promoting cryptocurrencies without disclosing they were being paid for their endorsements (Kardashian, Paul, and Lohan have all settled); in November, investors filed a class-action lawsuit against Caitlyn Jenner for allegedly misleading them about the value of her $JENNER coin.
Rudekays says he first heard about the Galaxy Gas cryptocurrency when someone — he declined to share their social media handle — messaged him on X, offering to pay him to promote the cryptocurrency and fund $500 worth of Galaxy Gas tanks for a new music video. “They’re telling me OK, go get the Galaxy Gas, go do this, go do that, rap about this, on this instrumental,” Rudekays says. “They’re giving me the whole plan.”
“Whippet Plan” uses the same beat as Drake’s “God’s Plan,” and the music video follows the same formula — but instead of giving out stacks of cash like the Canadian rapper, Rudekays and his friends hand out tanks of Galaxy Gas to people they encounter on the street. In the beginning of the video, a title card reads, “The budget for this video was $GG.”
After the video, Rudekays says he bought into $GG: He joined a Telegram channel with the anonymous crypto traders who had funded his music video and began posting screenshots of his earnings from his own investment in the Galaxy Gas coin. “When someone starts telling you about crypto, that’s a life-changing experience,” he says. “Galaxy Gas changed my life.” Even though he was using Galaxy Gas before he was getting paid to promote the coin, Rudekays now says that whippets have solely been a means to an end for him. “I don’t even like to hit that shit,” he says. “It’s just marketing, promotion.”
A member of the Telegram channel, who goes by dopevelli on X, says he stumbled on the Galaxy Gas cryptocurrency at the beginning of September and introduced it to the rest of his crypto-trading community online. He claims that someone from the group, though he says he wasn’t involved, connected with Rudekays and Lil Tae to promote the coin (Lil Tae tells me he was paid around $1,500 to promote the coin in a since-deleted video). According to DexScreener, a site that tracks the performance of cryptocurrencies, the market cap for $GG rose to around $1.4 million on September 10, the week after Rudekays’ “Whippets” video was released. The coin peaked at over $3 million on November 20. Its current market cap is $57,000.
Despite the fact that Galaxy Gas has stopped online sales through major retailers and transferred ownership, both Rudekays and Lil Tae tell me it’s easier than ever to get tanks of the brand’s nitrous oxide at smoke shops and gas stations around Atlanta. Lil Tim, another up-and-coming Atlanta rapper who put out a song called “Whippet In My Body” in September, tells me that he’s spent so much on Galaxy Gas at his local smoke shop that they now give him tanks for free. When I ask Tim if he worries that his song promotes whippets to his peers, he says he’s merely talking about his own day-to-day life. “I don’t tell any of y’all boys. Go smoke a whippet with me right now,” Tim says. “I’m just saying it’s in my body.”
For Rudekays, Galaxy Gas is just the most recent flavor of the month in Atlanta. “Say some new weed come out,” he says. “You’re gonna see everybody smoking shit like that. New Jordans come out, you’re gonna see everyone in the hood with them on. That’s all it is.” The trend has already died down with young people in the city, according to Rudekays, but both Lil Tae and Lil Tim say that they believe the whippet trend is here to stay. “Keep buying the whippets, keep getting high,” Tim says. “This shit is only gonna get better and better. The new flavors coming in.”
Rudekays says that he and the rest of the Telegram chat sold off their $GG in early October. In his recent songs and music videos, Galaxy Gas tanks and any mention of whippets have been noticeably absent. On October 2, in seemingly his final post about Galaxy Gas, Rudekays twists the nozzle and sprays the contents of an entire tank of nitrous oxide out in the middle of the street. His caption for the post reads, “#StopWhippetsMovement.” Compared to his other Galaxy Gas-related content, the response to the post has been muted: the video has just under 5,000 views.
