Keith "RoaringKitty" Gill returned to YouTube on June 7, three years after he spearheaded the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, inspired a major motion picture, and rode off into the sunset. The video above, from Atrioc, summarizes all the reasons this didn't go well.
June 7 was a rough day for "Apes," the subset of memestock investors who care less about turning a profit than in winning a war against some imaginary conspiracy of evil hedge funds. For three years they've been rationalizing why they're not getting rich, and convincing themselves that the great RoaringKitty would agree with all their absurd theories if he was still around. When he announced his comeback livestream, the hype was that a) he would confirm their beliefs and b) the stock price would go to the moon. Neither of these things happened.
One of the wackier Ape concepts is that you can own a share in GameStop and refuse to sell, but the evil "hedgies" can still illegally borrow that share to use in a nefarious short attack. So many Apes have exalted the practice of moving your shares from trading platforms, like Robinhood and E-Trade, to the Direct Registration System (DRS) as a defense against this non-existent threat. In April about 75 million GameStop shares--roughly 25% of all the company's floating shares--were registered with DRS, and almost all of those probably belong to Apes. Apes who swear by DRS have always assumed RoaringKitty would be on board with this strategy, as would GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, whom they believe is sympathetic to their cause.
However, the entire strategy of locking the float in DRS, to keep shares out of the hands of short investors, falls apart if GameStop dilutes the stock by issuing new shares. Apes just assumed that Cohen wouldn't do that to them. But when RoaringKitty returned to Twitter in May, the stock price jumped, so GameStop issued 45 million shares to get some of that money. And on June 7, GameStop went out of its way to take advantage of the RoaringKitty livestream hype to issue another 75 million shares. It's basically a license to print money for the company, but it's bad for the stock price, which is bad for the Apes.
To a normal observer, it's pretty clear that Keith Gill created a situation where Ryan Cohen threw the Apes under a bus. So the Apes were sorting through a lot of cognitive dissonance on the morning of June 7. But they remained optimistic that RoaringKitty's livestream would salvage the day. All the facts on the ground that created fear, uncertainty, and doubt wouldn't matter. With the right words, RoaringKitty could instantly prove all that stuff was fake news to test their faith, and now that faith would be rewarded. After three years of enduring failed prophecy, cooking up fringe theories that fell flat, and digging for clues in all the wrong places, Apes had high expectations that Gill would issue a statement that finally hand them an unambiguous victory. They did not get it.
Gill opened his stream with this weird gag where he pretended to be injured and comatose for about two minutes. If you could figure out what the gag was--that he was being brought back to life or something--it was not funny. If you couldn't figure that out, he just seemed like a delusional idiot. When he finally dropped the act he just started rambling as if it was any other livestream, and he had nothing in particular to talk about. Gill's weird laugh reminded me of Tom Cruise's most unhinged moments. He reacted to the stock dropping as though he was supposed to care but really didn't.
During the stream, Gill shared a screen revealing his investment position. (I mean, he could have altered the numbers on the screen--he even demonstrated that he knows how to do that sort of thing--but to my knowledge he had no motive to do this.) His shares are all in E-Trade, not DRS, and he's made a substantial investment in short-term call options. Either of these facts would be considered heretical to most Apes, according to the canon they've built up since RoaringKitty was assumed into heaven logged off in 2021.
I've been following the fallout of June 7, as Apes try to cope with everything that happened. I've seen quite a few of them struggle to keep the faith, while saying things like "All Ryan Cohen had to do was not do this..." or "All RoaringKitty had to do was just say this..." They don't understand why these guys would take actions that don't make Apes rich. The simplest explanation, of course, is that each of them is in it for himself. (Also, perhaps neither of them is as clever as Apes would have you believe.) But considering that possibility would force Apes to admit that they've wasted a lot of money, and we can't have that! So it's quite a conundrum--it's hard work maintaining a cult when your idols actively work against you.
The most coherent new spin I've seen goes like this: "Shut up and stop complaining, Ryan Cohen and RoaringKitty have a business to run, they don't owe you an explanation." This is popular among the Apes who claim to be uninterested in sick gains, and simply want to invest in a company they love and believe in. They don't care if the stock price goes up. They don't care if they get a return on their investments. They just want to give money into GameStop, and expect nothing in return but GameStop's continued survival. At this stage, you can barely even call what they're doing "investment"--it's more like charity, or perhaps a religious offering.
