Splividend (Patreon)

What a wild week, I haven't even been able to compile a fraction of the good stuff purely because I'm also trying to wrap up this actual long form video that I'm working on.

In short it appeared as though Keith Gill's Twitter account came out of hibernation last week only to spend a week pumping Apes up with a bunch of hype posts. However as time went on the posting coming out of the account grew more and more suspect: Tweets were all pre-scheduled, they were all vague hype post edits of movie clips with nothing outright confirming that Keith was behind them, no journalists were able to get a response, and the sheer volume of this nonsense was, simply put, rather spammy, coming every half hour by the end of the week.

While Keith was certainly fond of memes and very much a hype and nonsense prone, terminally-online poster, and while his communication with the outside world was largely relegated to reaction clips before the account went silent, the new output was more extreme than he normally posted, more edited, and seemingly referenced a lot of intermediate lore and drama from after Keith seemingly exited the scene.

This led to various speculations on who was behind it, if the account had been compromised, or if maybe he had sold it. Compromised was dismissed the longer it went on, the results were so obvious that even Musk's lobotomized Twitter would have the wherewithal to check for suspicious log-in activity. The theory that Gill had sold the account was initially corroborated by a Twitter user SCHL0Ms (who was the origin of the "GMail is sunsetting hoax several years back) claiming to have bought the account with the aid of online betting platform Polymarket, but then several days later Polymarket claimed to have lied in concert with SCHL0Ms who is operated by troll art collective/crypto DAO Remilia Corporation. Of course this only partially dispelled the theory since the whole performance meshed well with Remilia's sensibilities, and "pretending to have pretended to have bought the account" is likewise exactly the kind of thing they'd go for. Either which way the only people who actually know what was going on with the account are the as yet unconfirmed people actually hitting post.

And it could, in the end, just be Keith. There's nothing saying that he hasn't indulged his worst impulses, lost all his money, and spent the past three years participating in Ape forums either silently or with an anonymous burner account.

Apes took this all at its most optimistic, reading it as Keith confirming he was still in the play and in the vagaries of the hype posts they inserted every crackpot theory they've baked in the past three years. As a result the price of GME spiked on Monday and even kissed $80 briefly Tuesday morning in pre-market.

Every Ape influencer logged in on Tuesday morning to declare victory, sure that this was just the beginning. Shortdestroyer posted "woke up this morning a millionaire," took a shower, ate some breakfast, then popped into my mentions to post "how does it feel knowing you were wrong and every single $GME holder is now smarter than you @foldablehuman 🤡"

But it couldn't hold. The infinite short interest Apes have faith in doesn't exist, and short interest in GME leading into the week was high as far as the market goes but ultimately fairly modest compared to 2020: no one was holding Melvin levels of reckless exposure, nor were they dumb enough to try and tank their way through it. No hedge funds were liquidated, if any short sellers were margin called it wasn't sufficient enough a ripple to even make a minor headline.

Many Apes, hitting green for the first time in years, ran for the exits. Computershare, GameStop's transfer agent who holds the direct registration book, crashed almost immediately Monday morning, was down for the rest of the day and most of Tuesday, and stayed intermittently inaccessible basically all week, a strong sign that DRS'd Apes were trying very hard to cash out.

In after market the price collapsed back to the still way-too-high $34, Shortdestroyer's paper millions evaporated, and he deleted his celebration tweet before @ing the SEC to complain about "obvious crime" (the price of GME not going up forever).

On Thursday Computershare released a Q&A video responding to accusations from numerous Ape influencers who had taken Heat Lamp theory to the extent of accusing CS of participating in market fraud. In this video they systematically dismantled Heat Lamp and several other load-bearing Ape theories from both a logical and operational angle, leaving Apes to fully confront the possibility that either they were wrong or CS is wholly compromised and DRS is broken.

Then Friday in pre-market GameStop announced their intent to sell 45 million shares into market. Now, legally if you're going to do a share offering you need to provide a financial update to go along with it as you cannot sell shares to the public on non-public  information. The Q1 preliminary indicated that GameStop's last year of aggressive cost cutting and store closures has resulted in revenue shrinking substantially faster than expenses and they needed to dip into their war chest to the tune of almost $225 million, putting them at less than $1b in the bank (a popular figure for Apes to cite in arguments). Revenue was down from over $1b to $880m YoY, a bad look for a company with a paper value of $12b.

That paper value did not last very long, as in response to the poor financials and dilution GME plummeted from $30 to $20 on the opening of trading and only recovered $2 over the course of the day.

Game Apes, of course, have spun the dilution as a good thing as it gives GameStop more (Ape) money for their turnaround. Many fixated on the specific wording of the offering, that GameStop "may" sell to market up to 45m shares, echoing the same "just because they said they might dilute doesn't mean they're going to, let alone that they have" rhetoric we saw a year ago from BBBY Apes. Of course Ryan Cohen isn't exactly known for his patience when it comes to dumping large quantities of shares, the sale almost certainly started the moment that the filings hit the desk of the SEC.

With the close of trading on Friday Keith's Twitter account posted what was clearly a goodbye message.

Then at the end of the day Cohen's lawyer in the pump-and-dump BBBY class action lawsuit filed a motion arguing that Cohen shouldn't be held accountable for market manipulation as the putative class victims in the case were themselves trying to manipulate the market, complete with Ape Tweets and Reddit quotes as evidence, because Ryan Cohen absolutely, categorically, does not care about the people who worship him and is not working behind the scenes to funnel them billions and billions of dollars.