GameStop’s stock price plunged 13% early Monday afternoon to a price just above $25 as hype cooled following a delayed shareholder meeting, where the firm’s most prominent investor went unnamed.
The price of GME shares has been turbulent since the online return of Keith Gill, better known as Roaring Kitty. The meme stock influencer reignited interest in the video game retailer last month, posting for the first time in years after emerging as the de facto face of GameStop fans in 2021.
Gill’s online return has been viewed among GameStop’s believers as a significant event, to the point where people speculated that he could be appointed to GameStop’s board of directors. However, Monday’s meeting lasted less than 30 minutes and appeared pretty routine.
“We’re not here to make promises or hype things up,” GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said during the meeting’s opening remarks. “We’re here to work.”
A proposal passed during the meeting that saw GameStop’s board of directors appointed for another year: Cohen, e-commerce executive Alan Attal, Volition Capital co-founder and Managing Partner Larry Cheng, and finance executive Jim Grube. Another proposal that passed appointed Deloitte & Touche as the company’s accounting firm for the next fiscal year.
The meeting was conducted by GameStop General Counsel Mark Robinson, who took several questions from the audience, which touched on the direct registration of GameStop shares and the company’s recent equity offerings.
“I don’t have too much to say on those,” Robinson said, referring to 120 million GameStop shares the company has issued over the past two months, which raised around $3 billion.
Robinson said the company will “continue to be supportive of [its] retail stockholders” that choose to directly register their shares with GameStop’s transfer agent ComputerShare, a move that GameStop’s proponents believe can prevent their shares from being lent to short sellers.
Meanwhile, GameStop shares traded hands around $25.12. When Gill began posting again to Twitter in mid-May after a three-year hiatus, the company’s shares had surged as high as $64.83.
GameStop’s annual meeting was unexpectedly adjourned last week following “overwhelming interest,” ComputerShare confirmed to CNBC. The Australian stock transfer company’s servers had crashed, and investors and fans waited for nearly an hour before the call was rescheduled.
According to Gill’s Reddit posts, his GameStop holdings were worth $586 million at one point, between a combination of shares and call options—a composition that has since changed.
By the time Gill returned to streaming about GameStop on YouTube just over a week ago—drawing over 700,000 viewers—the value of his holdings had already begun to slide. As of his latest “YOLO update,” he held 9 million in GameStop shares valued at $268 million.
Before the meeting began, GameStop fanatics scrutinized seemingly minute details about the call within Superstonk, a Reddit community where Gill has shared several updates on his holdings. Directions asking GameStop investors who do business with Robinhood to join via a designated link were widely viewed by users as a form of trolling from the video game retailer.
“Is that for real?” a user going by potato_lover asked, while another named Vinceton remarked, “That’s the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
Robinhood restricted trading for GameStop and other meme stocks as prices surged in 2021. In May, however, the company’s CEO Vlad Tenev said that “upgrading some of [its] systems” would prevent the stock trading platform from failing amid GameStop’s renewed interest.
When Gill live streamed about GameStop weeks ago, the meme stock influencer said he believes in the firm’s management team, including Ryan Cohen.
“He seems to be taking the right approach, given this unique situation,” Gill said. “Let’s see where it goes from here.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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