26 January 2021: Elon Musk tweets one word: Gamestonk
With GameStop shares already soaring on a Reddit-fueled squeeze, Elon Musk tweeted Gamestonk!! and a link to the WallStreetBets forum. The stock jumped again in after-hours trading as millions of retail traders piled in, partly to punish hedge funds that had bet against it. It was a meme, a protest and a trade at the same time. Fundamentals were invited but did not attend.
The lesson: When a stock moves on tweets instead of earnings, both the upside and the downside are unbounded.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in GameStop at the start of 2020 → $16,667 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is 16.7 times the money, and $14,574 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What GameStop teaches: Crowded short positions can produce explosive squeezes, but price spikes driven by flows rather than fundamentals rarely persist for late buyers.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $8.50 | $2,941 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $4.50 | $5,556 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $1.50 | $16,667 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought GameStop? Every starting year and the full story →
More GameStop history
- 28 January 2021: Robinhood stops the GameStop rally
- 18 February 2021: Congress grills the GameStop crowd
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40