From its offices on the 57th floor of 1 World Trade Center, employees at Masterworks hawk fractional ownership of blue-chip artworks, promising retail investors hefty returns. Reporting in both ARTnews in 2022 and the New York Times in 2024 has revealed a freewheeling atmosphere in which the company has played fast and loose with legal and ethical guidelines. An initial funding round valued the company at more than $1 billion, and by early 2022, the company had traded more than 100 paintings, to the tune of $450 million, ARTnews reported.
Now, former chief product officer Hai Min Tran is threatening to sue, according to Masterworks. A December letter he sent the company via his New York attorneys, Giskan Solotaroff & Anderson, says he was illegally terminated upon returning to work from paternity leave. (ARTnews has not been able to review the letter.) The company has since called this claim “wholly meritless” and filed a legal complaint on February 5 in New York state court, saying Tran resigned before going on leave and then tried to wring money out of the company.
Scott Lynn, a serial tech entrepreneur and art collector who founded Masterworks in 2017, brought on Tran as head of design in 2018. Tran, who reported directly to Lynn, was promoted to chief marketing officer in 2021 and then chief product officer in 2022, where he ultimately oversaw a team of more than 40 employees. On LinkedIn, Tran says that in his successive positions he designed the core product experience, architected the operational flywheel, grew the marketing team from 0 to over 25, and managed up to $4 million in monthly spending, taking responsibility for overall product vision, strategy, and day-to-day operational management and personally designing every iteration of the web and mobile app.
On LinkedIn, Tran also describes himself as a cofounder of Masterworks. Masterworks disputes this claim, with an attorney for the company saying in a statement to ARTnews, “Hai Min Tran was an early employee but not a co-founder, as he did not found the company with Mr. Lynn, finance it, or come up with the idea.”
According to Masterworks’s suit, Tran’s eventual departure from the company began when he told Lynn that he was “bored” with his role and would be moving to the West Coast. (Tran now lives in Seattle, according to the filing.) The company claims that Tran didn’t want to work full-time anymore, but that out of good will, it would let him take his full paternity leave as well as consider bringing him back for up to 20 hours a week on special projects on a contract basis, “as was Tran’s stated desire.”
Per the suit, Lynn and Tran discussed potential replacements and that Tran agreed to help Alberto Simon, formerly head of product, to take on the chief product officer position, which Simon assumed in January 2025.
Masterworks cites a Slack conversation, dated to August 26, 2025, as the first instance in which Tran signaled that he had not left the company but only his role as chief product officer. After Tran said he would return next week, Lynn professes to be confused and asks Tran if he thought he was returning to a full-time role. Tran replies, “I told you before leave that I wanted to reduce my hours due to being the primary child care provider,” before adding, “For my own reasons, I have not, and will not resign. If we’re at an impasse and you want to terminate me, we can discuss severance.”
Lynn replies, “Are you actually joking Hai? You’re trying to leverage our relationship of 6+ years to get extra money when you clearly resigned from the CPO position?”
“Resigning from a position does not mean I quit the company,” Tran responds, saying, at another point, “Show me where I resigned?”
In its complaint, Masterworks states, “This is an incorrect statement of law and defies common sense. When an employee voluntarily resigns, the employer does not have an obligation to create a new position specifically tailored to the employee’s scheduling preferences or desires. A resignation from one’s position constitutes a voluntary termination of the employment relationship that relieves the employer of any duty to fashion alternative employment arrangements.”
According to LinkedIn, Tran started his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, working as an interactive designer at marketing agency Digitas and an art director at marketing firm Carat before coming to New York as an art director at R/GA, a consultancy and design and advertising agency. He then headed back to the Bay Area, where he worked as art/creative director at video game company Zynga and then director of user experience at game developer Breaktime Studios, which he indicates was sold to Sega. He then cofounded Mind Pirate, a venture-backed gaming studio later acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Before going on to Masterworks, he was for three years semi-retired, saying he “took a break after two exits and went ‘Jack Kerouac on their ass.’”
Giskan Solotaroff & Anderson, Tran’s legal representative, did not return requests for comment sent via phone and email.
In its statement to ARTnews, an attorney for Masterworks said, “Like many companies, Masterworks is tired of dealing with frivolous claims from self-entitled people who think they are owed something when they are not. Instead of attempting to secure undeserved sums of money through frivolous litigation, we suggest that Mr. Tran look for a new job.”
