Young Thug and Gunna’s Tumultuous Relationship: A Timeline

Gunna and Thugga first interacted back in 2015, after they were introduced through mutual friend and local Atlanta community leader Keith “King” Troup. At the time, Young Thug was deep in his Barter 6 run, and Gunna stopped by the rapper’s “With That” music video shoot for an introduction. While the pair became friends, their bond was then strengthened following the death of Troup in December of 2015, which Gunna has spoken extensively about.

“He was like my uncle,” Gunna told Billboard in 2018. “Troup would always try to tell us, ‘Get some money. Stay out of trouble.’ He always tried to let us know there’s more to this.”

Young Thug officially introduced Gunna to the world in 2016 with the release of his album Jeffrey. On the album’s second track “Floyd Mayweather,” Gunna dropped off his first official verse affiliated with YSL. Turns out, it was only the beginning.

“Do this s—t all on my own, don’t need no deal,” Gunna and Thug spit simultaneously.

While the timeline is a biz hazy, Gunna dropped off his debut Drip Season mixtape on YSL Records on October 14, 2016. Thugga appeared on the track “Cop Me a Foreign,” and a few weeks later, Thug announced his newly founded record label. It’s likely that Gunna and Thug spoke about this months before Drip Season’s release, but Gunna wouldn’t officially join the YSL roster for a few more months.

Around February 2017, Gunna officially linked with YSL Records. From that point on, it was all hands on deck, as Gunna dropped off Drip Season 2 and his critically lauded Drip Harder mixtape with Lil Baby by 2018. Thug would of course be featured on both, on the songs “Secure the Vibe” and “My Jeans.” Gunna’s run would continue with 2020’s WUNNA and 2022’s DS4EVER as his career really started to take off.

In May of 2022, Young Thug and 26 other YSL affiliates were arrested as part of the sprawling RICO Case against them. Thug of course faced the most charges, with police alleging he was the leader of a criminal “gang” masquerading as a record label. Wunna turned himself in two days later on May 11, and was charged with a single count of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. They were both denied bond on multiple occasions.

Gunna then accepted his much-discussed Alford plea deal in 2022. As the Young Thug and YSL RICO trial heated up, Gunna was among many of the early YSL affiliates to take a plea deal. His career took a big hit as a result, with allegations of Gunna being a rat spreading around all corners of the hip-hop landscape. The Drip or Drown rapper put out a statement via his lawyers denying this allegation, and claimed he at no point cooperated with law enforcement. Still, allegations of him being a “snitch” spread far and wide, and threatened to dampen his, at the time, spotless hip-hop career.

The situation was then made worse when court footage emerged showing Gunna answering “yes” to numerous key questions involving YSL, including that the label was allegedly a gang and that crimes were committed under the roster.

Six months after striking his plea deal, Gunna returned with his comeback album, A Gift & a Curse. The featureless YSL Records release dropped on June 16 and included some subliminal shots aimed at the snitching allegations as a whole. The album was a surprising success despite the allegations, and in turn gave him a commercial hit record with “fukumean.” The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was inescapable on apps like TikTok.

A week later, Thug himself returned with Business Is Business. Neither artist was featured on each other’s projects, and throughout this run Gunna remained openly supportive of his still-incarcerated label head.

While dealing with subliminal insults from Lil Baby, Lil Durk and more over his snitching allegations, Gunna kept it pushing. He returned again with his Wun of One album in 2024. Thug was still in the midst of his high profile RICO Trial, so him and Gunna weren’t in communication at all during this time. However, the album was also released via YSL Records.

In a video interview with Spotify’s RapCaviar, Gunna clarified after dropping Wun of One that he’s “still signed to YSL.”

“I’m still providing. We’re still pushing,” he said while sitting outside his mother’s house. “No paperwork has been changed, you know what I’m saying? So it’s like, whatever’s been getting and how we’ve been pushing this s–t, it’s still going.”

Gunna did not mention Young Thug.

After months of rampant criticism and speculation, YSL’s co-founder YSL Mondo hopped on his Instagram Story to defend Gunna against the snitch allegations. In a lengthy post, Mondo said that “technically he didn’t rat,” but added that Gunna, “just kinda folded under pressure and should’ve just stayed down with his mans till everything was over.”

He also spoke about 6ix9ine, who became a federal informant in a RICO case against the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, adding that 6ix9ine is a rat because he sent multiple people to jail. “Saying Gunna was a rat is deadass wrong,” Mondo concluded.

On Halloween day 2024, Young Thug’s lengthy RICO trial finally concluded, with the rapper being freed after entering a plea deal. The end result was 15 years of probation for Thugga, which also included stipulations surrounding who he could and could not contact at YSL. His lawyer Brian Steel asked the judge specifically if he could still work with Wunna and Thug’s biological brother Unfoonk. Judge Paige Reese Whitaker approved both of these conditions, noting specifically that Gunna was contractually obligated to interact with Thug as a result of being on YSL.

However in the year since, Thugga has done a few tweet and deletes that prove he has no plans to work with Gunna. The most direct one came as Gunna got ready to release The Last Wun earlier in 2025. “Gunna stop acting like we friends on the internet, I don’t know u my guy,” Thug wrote.

Wunna seemingly responded on the song “prototype.” “N—a had tweeted my name, must’ve had to be a typo,” Gunna spit.

After a series of jail phone calls between Young Thug and his associates leaked online in September of 2025, one of the calls finally addressed Thugga’s issues with Gunna.

“He gave the jurors the agreement that it’s a gang,” Thugga said in part of a leaked call with 21 Savage. “He said, ‘YSL is a gang’ and he know people on this trial who committed crimes in furtherance of the gang… you don’t know nobody on this case, that’s a lie! That’s a full blown lie. ‘I know individuals on this case that committed crimes in furtherance of a gang’… just so you could say slime did it? That’s RICO.”

Thug went on to say that because of Gunna’s plea deal, he was the one who made it a RICO case.