foldablehuman
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Splividend
🕑 Added 2024-05-19 00:59:43 +0000 UTCWhat a wild week, I haven't even been able to compile a fraction of the good stuff purely because I'm also trying to wrap up this actual long form video that I'm working on.
In short it appeared as though Keith Gill's Twitter account came out of hibernation last week only to spend a week pumping Apes up with a bunch of hype posts. However as time went on the posting coming out of the account grew more and more suspect: Tweets were all pre-scheduled, they were all vague hype post edits of movie clips with nothing outright confirming that Keith was behind them, no journalists were able to get a response, and the sheer volume of this nonsense was, simply put, rather spammy, coming every half hour by the end of the week.
While Keith was certainly fond of memes and very much a hype and nonsense prone, terminally-online poster, and while his communication with the outside world was largely relegated to reaction clips before the account went silent, the new output was more extreme than he normally posted, more edited, and seemingly referenced a lot of intermediate lore and drama from after Keith seemingly exited the scene.
This led to various speculations on who was behind it, if the account had been compromised, or if maybe he had sold it. Compromised was dismissed the longer it went on, the results were so obvious that even Musk's lobotomized Twitter would have the wherewithal to check for suspicious log-in activity. The theory that Gill had sold the account was initially corroborated by a Twitter user SCHL0Ms (who was the origin of the "GMail is sunsetting hoax several years back) claiming to have bought the account with the aid of online betting platform Polymarket, but then several days later Polymarket claimed to have lied in concert with SCHL0Ms who is operated by troll art collective/crypto DAO Remilia Corporation. Of course this only partially dispelled the theory since the whole performance meshed well with Remilia's sensibilities, and "pretending to have pretended to have bought the account" is likewise exactly the kind of thing they'd go for. Either which way the only people who actually know what was going on with the account are the as yet unconfirmed people actually hitting post.
And it could, in the end, just be Keith. There's nothing saying that he hasn't indulged his worst impulses, lost all his money, and spent the past three years participating in Ape forums either silently or with an anonymous burner account.
Apes took this all at its most optimistic, reading it as Keith confirming he was still in the play and in the vagaries of the hype posts they inserted every crackpot theory they've baked in the past three years. As a result the price of GME spiked on Monday and even kissed $80 briefly Tuesday morning in pre-market.
Every Ape influencer logged in on Tuesday morning to declare victory, sure that this was just the beginning. Shortdestroyer posted "woke up this morning a millionaire," took a shower, ate some breakfast, then popped into my mentions to post "how does it feel knowing you were wrong and every single $GME holder is now smarter than you @foldablehuman 🤡"
But it couldn't hold. The infinite short interest Apes have faith in doesn't exist, and short interest in GME leading into the week was high as far as the market goes but ultimately fairly modest compared to 2020: no one was holding Melvin levels of reckless exposure, nor were they dumb enough to try and tank their way through it. No hedge funds were liquidated, if any short sellers were margin called it wasn't sufficient enough a ripple to even make a minor headline.
Many Apes, hitting green for the first time in years, ran for the exits. Computershare, GameStop's transfer agent who holds the direct registration book, crashed almost immediately Monday morning, was down for the rest of the day and most of Tuesday, and stayed intermittently inaccessible basically all week, a strong sign that DRS'd Apes were trying very hard to cash out.
In after market the price collapsed back to the still way-too-high $34, Shortdestroyer's paper millions evaporated, and he deleted his celebration tweet before @ing the SEC to complain about "obvious crime" (the price of GME not going up forever).
On Thursday Computershare released a Q&A video responding to accusations from numerous Ape influencers who had taken Heat Lamp theory to the extent of accusing CS of participating in market fraud. In this video they systematically dismantled Heat Lamp and several other load-bearing Ape theories from both a logical and operational angle, leaving Apes to fully confront the possibility that either they were wrong or CS is wholly compromised and DRS is broken.
Then Friday in pre-market GameStop announced their intent to sell 45 million shares into market. Now, legally if you're going to do a share offering you need to provide a financial update to go along with it as you cannot sell shares to the public on non-public information. The Q1 preliminary indicated that GameStop's last year of aggressive cost cutting and store closures has resulted in revenue shrinking substantially faster than expenses and they needed to dip into their war chest to the tune of almost $225 million, putting them at less than $1b in the bank (a popular figure for Apes to cite in arguments). Revenue was down from over $1b to $880m YoY, a bad look for a company with a paper value of $12b.
That paper value did not last very long, as in response to the poor financials and dilution GME plummeted from $30 to $20 on the opening of trading and only recovered $2 over the course of the day.
Game Apes, of course, have spun the dilution as a good thing as it gives GameStop more (Ape) money for their turnaround. Many fixated on the specific wording of the offering, that GameStop "may" sell to market up to 45m shares, echoing the same "just because they said they might dilute doesn't mean they're going to, let alone that they have" rhetoric we saw a year ago from BBBY Apes. Of course Ryan Cohen isn't exactly known for his patience when it comes to dumping large quantities of shares, the sale almost certainly started the moment that the filings hit the desk of the SEC.
With the close of trading on Friday Keith's Twitter account posted what was clearly a goodbye message.
Then at the end of the day Cohen's lawyer in the pump-and-dump BBBY class action lawsuit filed a motion arguing that Cohen shouldn't be held accountable for market manipulation as the putative class victims in the case were themselves trying to manipulate the market, complete with Ape Tweets and Reddit quotes as evidence, because Ryan Cohen absolutely, categorically, does not care about the people who worship him and is not working behind the scenes to funnel them billions and billions of dollars.
Comments
Tym
Have we confirmed if DFV is actually back or if someone has hijacked his media?
MediocreClient
Allegedly there's going to be a DFV livestream on Friday, and I can't help but feel this is going to spin out into some kind of triple-play rugpull.
KevinR
Apparently things are continuing to get interesting around Gill. Massachusetts investigation: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/massachusetts-regulator-probes-roaring-kittys-gamestop-trades-2024-06-04/ That has a link to a "DFV" reddit post on 02 June 2024.
Zebedee Weetaluktuk
Really nice shot of the rockies. Mountains in blue sky sometimes have this colour range that is perfectly matched to what cameras can capture, so you can see these old photos of mountains, and say there is no way it really looks like that, but then you go there, and it does.
JackFrost
Do wonder how many people saw it hit $80 an immediately shorted GME
FoldableHuman
It wasn't even order placing, it was login, they couldn't even get to their dashboards to place orders.
KevinR
(This is all schadenfreude. My employer's systems tend to get overloaded on an annual basis for thoroughly-predictable reasons, and can fail for lengthy periods as well. So I try to explore other system failures, so I'm less tempted to look askance at the folks who run our systems.)
KevinR
That makes sense. Although both Robinhood and Computershare failed under the same pressure (high volume of correlated trades, although not coordinated), they failed for different reasons. Robinhood seems to be of the move-fast-break-things model, and so was built without redundancy in mind. Correlated trades broke what little modeling they'd done. Computershare, on the other hand, was presumably never built for urgency. High volume of trades would just get added to the queue, to be resolved over hours or days. The failure this time (if I'm reading between the lines of the main post) is that the order-placing system didn't have good fallbacks. Which is something that can happen to most any storefront (B2B or small business) when it suddenly becomes relevant. (Especially if they were built as a paper business and have only recently shifted to an electronic system. I don't know if Computershare was still in the paper model at the time of "This is Financial Advice" [although the proximity of the "envelope" and "firearms on Computershare statements" sequences is suggestive], but "crashed" and "intermittently inaccessible" scans as electronic to me.)
FoldableHuman
Computershare, at its core, is a B2B service provider, their product is handling a lot of really deep in the weeds administrative functions for companies. They are not a company that's had any real reason to be built with this kind of robustness in mind in the same way my Civic isn't built to withstand the stresses of orbital reentry.
Justin Alexander
The only silver lining is that hopefully this bump gave at least some of the people actually conned by this nonsense a chance to cut their losses on better terms or even get back into the green long enough to bail.
JJ
Bee
Jimmy Gzus
Stealing the casino analogy from This is Financial Advice, this stock frenzy is like watching someone at the roulette table, convinced that 18 is their golden ticket. They're shouting theories that once 18 hits, it’s going to hit ten times in a row, and the casino is hiding this truth. They bet all their money on 18 every spin. Usually, they lose, but when it finally hits, they’re over the moon. They're doing victory laps, convinced they’ve outsmarted everyone, especially when 18 hits twice in a row by pure chance. This excitement draws random passersby to load up on 18, believing in the mythical 10-in-a-row run. Some original theorists take their gains and quietly slink out, while the purists and new believers keep betting on 18, blissfully ignoring that 18 has stopped coming up and their winnings are vanishing. They hark back to the fact that 18 did come up before, saying, "See, I told you 18 would hit!" while their chips quietly disappear into the random noise of the wheel. Loud celebrations turn into angry rants about how 18 wasn't allowed to keep coming up, now fueled by a mix of purists and new recruits. It’s a combination of blind optimism and the thrill of the gamble, with the casino smirking in the background, knowing reality always wins. So, here’s to those Apes, newly recruited and long time bag holders, hoping 18 hits ten times in a row, thinking they’ll bankrupt the casino, when really, they’re just handing their chips right back.
KevinR
Between Robin Hood and Computershare, this crowd has crashed two entities. Is there any sense for why the infrastructure has these weaknesses? Have the human-interfacing parts of the system atrophied such that hundreds or maybe thousands of people acting together overwhelm things? Are the apes (accidentally) coordinating on the cheapest parts of the infrastructure, and so finding failure points due to that cheapness? Failure points that costlier, mainstream entities avoid through not cutting every corner? Is there a more systemic problem of algorithmic traders responding to the arbitrage opportunities that apes create, and that those algorithmic traders collectively are overwhelming the system with sheer volume? (E.g., how many times has NYSE or Nasdaq throttled things for an afternoon because of price movement driving high volume?)
James Rule
I'm just here for the clouds.
Eric Riley
It astounds me how little people understand how the stock-market actually works, which allows things like this to happen. As you were describing their theory, I just kept shaking my head and thinking, "this is not going to turn out well". And quelle surprise! It did not turn out well.
Matt Killmon
What’s the over/under on this being actual Gill trying to boost the last of his GME enough over his cost basis to fully divest? Is this not just a dumber, less formal version of Cohen’s move with BBBY? His testimony to Congress included the line about still being invested in GME… I dunno. I didn’t watch all this happen at the time, so my knowledge is basically what I’ve heard folks like Dan and the If Books Could Kill guys (Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri) say about it.
Duney Mole
Immediately ran over to the YT video to check on kxv210. Edit: After watching this video, the Ape obsession with maintaining their specific shares reminds me of the guy in the NFTs video who suggests buying two NFTs because "you'll get emotionally attached to one of them". Same group of folks who bandy the term "wife-changing money" around.
Twit In A Hat
Welp, time to rewatch This Is Financial Advice so that any of this makes any sense again.
Knobiknows
Really digging the Terry Pratchett look
lostsheep
You should have ended the video with you touching grass because sure as shit none of the people involved in this have. That is unless they are a shovel salesman. God why cant men of my generation start a cult around something fun not the finance industry…
orestes
Conspiracies like this are fascinating to me. I just cannot comprehend the mindset of people like that. I was raised religious, went to religious schools from 5-18 and still couldn't muster faith. The idea that there are people out there who can have blind faith in internet randos and their batshit theories is both deeply disturbing and wildly captivating to me.
Tom
1. sick ass beard 2. thanks for the update man, this has been nuts 3. sick ass beard
Brett
I originally thought it was maybe Gill posting to keep his account active - he didn't do anything on Youtube or Reddit, just Twitter. If his Twitter account ever got deleted, there'd 100% be a blue-check fake Gill account on there claiming to be him almost immediately.
Stephen Maxwell
As someone who is no longer on Twitter and refuses to go back to Twitter, this post was hard to follow. (Too many of y'all are still addicts in denial.) Until I actually watched the attached video, which was very good. And those were some pretty clouds.
Ross Vincent
I love that about the prairies. You can watch an absolute torrential downpour happening far away, while it's a bright sunny day directly overhead.
Loveletters
Dan, how funny is the dilution on a scale of 1-10?
Luis
Those *were* some very pretty clouds!
Pietro Gagliardi
All right I decided to look for myself and yep it's exactly the one I thought. Why do people have to ruin good things. (What Fast Company won't tell you is that the name of their NFT is *also* a reference to the same thing.)
Michael Chui
*reads Pietro's comment* I am kinda curio-- *reads Matthew's comment* Nope, I'm out.
Jeff Good
Nice Movies with Mikey shirt!
Myth
I appreciate your foldability, human
Matthew Schaap
When I first read this I thought "No idea what it means, probably a pedo reference given context clues." Five minutes and a web search later: it's somehow even more morally bankrupt than I expected.
APatreonUsernamePun IsTheLowestFormOfWit
Reddit is showing me that, after BBBY is dead and in the ground, and GME can't even pretend to be alive to any but the most ardent believers, that they're on now to... FFIE? Which is some electric car penny stock, so swings give wild percentage numbers. It's nothing to do with anything, it's a literal find and replace from r/GME and r/BBBY with another stock ticker, there's no substance at all but the continued ravings of a cult that can't admit that they were wrong.
Pietro Gagliardi
"who is operated by troll art collective/crypto DAO Remilia Corporation" oh god I hope that name does not refer to what I think it does 🧛‍♀️
FoldableHuman
Boring truth: I had an errand out on the edge of town and decided to do two birds with one stone.
FoldableHuman
oh, right, I can just embed links as hypertext, da doi.
Deko Puma
Thank you for keeping us updated on this trainwreck of a tire fire.
Phlosioneer
BTW, here's the computershare FAQ that the post mentions: [removed] Edit: I don't think I found the right URL, unfortunately.
Brain
I love hearing all about ape nonsense, but I need to know if you drove out specifically to get some nice rural background or if you were driving down the road and were suddenly assaulted by inspiration that required pulling off to the side just to make this.
Bag of Tricks
With the recently announced dilution, and the ape theory that it's actually the newest One Weird Trick to finally get the better of the shorts, we have a newly coined term: dilividend.
Phlosioneer
Oh it'll never truly die. Conspiracies never do. Like old companies, they'll consolidate when times are tough, and proliferate when believers are plentiful.
Lyra Large
I can't believe this whole saga is *still going*. The power of delusional hype is very strong.
Phlosioneer
That's a next-level beard you're growing
Robert
just chiming to say that Apes originally registering their shares with ComputerShare specifically because it made it harder to cash out & as a loyalty ritual, now unironically claiming that feature-not-bug hindrance was a Conspiracy of ComputerShare to prevent them from cashing out their Gorillians is insanely funny. They specifically kneecapped themselves as a performative gesture to “the movement” but can’t bear to look in the mirror for the culprit who deprived them their Wife Changing Money.
