Did you wake up on a Monday morning and think that today is the day you joke about losing over $50 million in a few hours? If you’re Roaring Kitty, aka Keith Gill, the answer is yes.
After Stoppage of play stocks closed down 12% for the session, the YOLO king of the WallStreetBets community job a screenshot showing his risky bet on the meme stock suffered another sharp drop in value.
The $17 million he lost on his 5 million shares in the company — according to his post on Reddit, where he is known as DeepFuckingValue — was the least of his worries. The decline in the underlying asset triggered an even larger change in the value of its derivatives position, which fell by an additional $34.5 million.
There’s a reason his dated posts on GameStop are all titled “YOLO Update,” short for You Only Live Once, the credo of stock speculators who emphasize a try-to-get-rich-or-get-rich mentality. die.
Indeed, Gill already saw the total of 300 million dollars go up in smoke in front of him on Friday, while he was on the verge of becoming a billionaire on paper.
GameStop thwarts short squeeze with sharing problem
His apparent attempt to trigger a massive sell-off of GameStop shares and catapult the value of his holdings into the low 10s was foiled after the company launched a surprise takeover bid that flooded the market with up to 75 million newly issued shares. The news caused the GameStop price to fall 40% on Friday, leaving it well below Gill’s required threshold.
Fortunately, he seems to take it all with humor. “You were a billionaire,” Gill wrote Monday in a self-deprecating post seen by more than 5 million users on Twitter.
It’s unclear what’s next for the 38-year-old, whose 2021 battle with GameStop short sellers and hedge funds alike Melvin Capital was immortalized last year on the big screen in Stupid money.
After a three-year absence, Gill returned to the stage on May 13 with a series of memes on social media, effectively announcing that the fight wasn’t over until he said it was.
On June 2, he then revealed that he had amassed a position in GameStop stock and call options worth more than $181 million.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
