Have you woken up on a Monday morning thinking 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 GameStop shares closed 12% lower for the session, the YOLO king of the WallStreetBets community posted a screenshot showing his risky bet on the meme stock taking another big drop in value.
The $17 million he lost on his 5 million shares in the company — according to his Reddit post, where he is known as DeepFuckingValue — was the least of his worries. The drop in the underlying asset caused an even bigger swing in the value of his derivatives position, which fell another $34.5 million.
There’s a reason why his dated GameStop posts are all titled “YOLO update,” short for You Only Live Once, the credo of meme stock speculators who emphasize a “get rich or die mentality.”
That’s because Gill watched his $300 million total go up in smoke on Friday, just as he was about to become a billionaire on paper.
GameStop thwarts short squeeze with stock issue
His apparent attempt to trigger a massive short squeeze in GameStop and catapult the value of his holdings into the 10-figures was foiled after the company launched a surprise stock offering that flooded the market with as much as 75 million newly issued shares. The news caused the GameStop price to drop 40% on Friday, leaving it well below the threshold Gill needed.
Fortunately, he seems to take it all with humor. “You goods a billionaire,” Gill wrote on Monday in a self-deprecating post seen by more than 5 million users on X, formerly Twitter.
It’s unclear what’s next for the 38-year-old, whose 2021 battle with GameStop short-sellers like hedge fund Melvin Capital was immortalized on the big screen last year in Stupid money.
After a three-year absence, Gill returned to the scene on May 13 with a series of memes on social media, essentially announcing that the fight wasn’t over until he said it was.
On June 2, he then revealed that he had built a GameStop stock and call options position worth more than $181 million.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
