since June 2021. It was a meme of a guy sitting up in a chair, holding a video game controller. When Gill pressed send, stock in GameStop Corp., the video game retailer, immediately shot up in after-hours trading, and by Monday’s open, it was $26.34, a nice 51 percent jump from Friday’s close at $17.46.
It is hard to know which companies the internet will bless with meme stock status. Even on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, there is not a politburo that decides what will get a big rally that week. A bunch of companies have made their own pick-me efforts to get the attention of the crowd, but most of them have been useless. AMC, the theater chain, has been the most high-profile success in the “intentionally becoming a meme stock” department.
And that says something about GameStop’s durability as an object of online affection. People have figured out that if enough of them buy a stock and don’t sell it, the stock will go up. But laws of gravity still apply, and unless the company can turn that love into real dollars that help the business, the meme stock is at risk of no longer being a stock at all., a definitive meme stock that had people buying shares even as the company was spiraling toward its bankrupt death.