Basically, a couple of major hedge funds had shorted (bet against) the stock of GameStop, as they expected it to go down for obvious reasons (people buy video games online, basically, now). Standard Wall Street stuff. But then thousands of users from a subReddit called WallStreetBets decided to all buy GameStop stock, causing the price to skyrocket and essentially destroying the position of the hedge funds and potentially losing them a ton of money. Meanwhile, the Redditors could make a lot of money from the short-sellers and hedge funds. It’s a risky thing to do — but so is short selling. And Elon Musk tweeted about it, as he is wont to do. Still confused? Don’t worry too much about it because you don’t need to have a Ph.D. in economics (or even remember whatever you were supposed to learn in The Big Short) to enjoy some great GameStop Stock memes. Regardless of how you feel about it, after all, it is a historical event. Here are a few of our favorites, starting with Musk’s tweet heard round the world. The internet had a lot of fun imagining GameStop suddenly becoming a Fortune 500 company. The fact that GameStop was suddenly in the news at all was perfect meme fodder. The fact that Reddit was also involved only made the whole thing funnier. And, of course, about half of the memes were people admitting they had no idea what was going on. Seriously, you are not alone in having no clue what the hell any of this actually means. No meme cycle is complete without TikTok getting involved and the popular video app did not disappoint, including offering some genuinely helpful explainers. Along with some pretty solid financial advice for anyone blindly throwing their money at GameStop stocks. And even a little philosophizing about what exactly this story could teach us about money and the economy in general.
