But then we have to find out why you had no choice and who are these people that are saying you have no choice?”īefore GameStop became a meme stock, the company had looked like it was dying.
“And if you had no choice, that’s understandable. “Did you sell your clients down the river, or did you have no choice?” pressed Musk. But when Robinhood announced it was putting a freeze on buying meme stocks, WallStreetBets smelt a rat. GameStop was disparagingly labelled a ‘meme stock’ by institutional investors and the mainstream press – essentially a company whose share price had rallied simply because armchair investors organising on social media had forced its stock to go viral, whether on principle, for profit or just for the #LOLZ. Wall Street was taking a beating.įor the Redditors, this was the single greatest act of grassroots investor activism in the history of the stock market. In its immediate aftermath, the price of GameStop shares rose 157 percent. Musk’s tweet was seen as an endorsement of both the GameStop rally and the WallStreetBets insurgency. If the price of GameStop stock rose, the Masters of the Universe lost. It was David versus Goliath – individual retail investors worth relative peanuts up against the Masters of the Universe, the term Tom Wolfe coined for New York traders in his 1980s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Posters urged each other to take GameStop shares “to the moon”, forcing the price up – usually through the Robinhood app. For months, the forum had broiled with hostility against US hedge funds betting that GameStop would go bust. WallStreetBets had two million users at the time, who tend to share investment advice in the form of memes, GIFs and internet slang. The tweet linked to a page on online forum Reddit called r/wallstreetbets. On 26th January, Musk threw one of his biggest bombs yet: a single word tweet to his 60 million followers that sent US financial markets into a frenzy: “GameStonk!!” The New York Times called him a “bomb-throwing troll”. In 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission ordered an executive to approve Musk’s tweets relating to Tesla before he sent them. His tweets have the power to add or wipe millions of dollars from a company’s valuation, including his own. Musk, who has a personal fortune of around $160 billion, is a regular on social media, where he is a prickly but seemingly authentic presence. “Why can’t people buy GameStop shares? The people demand an answer and they want to know the details and the truth.” “What happened last week?” Musk said, drilling into a nervous-sounding Tenev. Robinhood’s users, and Musk, were furious that trading in GameStop stock had been suspended, with the stock platform appearing to side with Wall Street. The unlikely boom was threatening to bankrupt some of Wall Street’s biggest institutional investors, who had bet on the stock’s failure. US video game retailer GameStop had fallen on hard times, yet its share price had soared by more than 18,000 percent in the last year. One company had surged faster and further than the rest. GameStop had been the magical place people went to buy the latest games and trade in old ones” But a few days before Musk called Tenev, Robinhood had suspended trading in a handful of shares that were unexpectedly surging, including Covid-threatened cinema chain AMC and struggling smartphone company BlackBerry. The app is simple, colourful and easy to use, like Uber or Bet365. As its name suggests, Robinhood is aimed at empowering the little guy – individuals trading a few hundred bucks, or whatever they can afford – against the big sharks of Wall Street. Tenev is the CEO of Robinhood, a stock-trading company and app that has revolutionised the industry by offering commission-free trading. But then he invited Vladimir Tenev on to his feed for an impromptu interview, and the mood changed. On 1st February 2021 Musk held court on a range of issues from the prospect of colonising Mars to how one of his companies was experimenting with human brain implants, currently being tested on pigs. The American multi-billionaire was making his debut on Clubhouse, a new invitation-only chat app, where users can broadcast conversations and interact with their audience.
0 kommentar(er)
