If any of my journo friends needs me to explain the Gamestop thing, this happens to lie at the exact intersection of things people forget I actually know a lot about and I will happily guide you through it

I hate that I am technically qualified to be a finance bro, but today my powers can be used for good

Okay, here we go:

When you buy a stock, you usually "go long" that is you don’t sell the stock for a long time and hold it in the hopes it will increase in value.

The opposite of this is to “go short" (see below) which is when you make money by saying that the stock will lose value.

Hedge funds can essentially make bets that a specific company will go down in value, and profit off of destroyed businesses

So, members of a subreddit catch wind that some hedge fund has placed billions in shorts on Gamestop. Billions of dollars bet that Gamestop is dead

And the reddits are like NOT TODAY SATANS

They all decide they will en masse to buy the stock the normal way on GameStop making GameStop’s shares move from virtually worthless to $350 a share in less than a week. Making the hedgefund LOSE billions.

(This is all a very big simplification, please for the love of god understand this is just the gist)

I'll jump here and just add the hedge funds are scams, they almost never beat the market, and what all of this is is just another example of how the stock market just shows where people in the stock market are putting money and has virtually nothing to do with the economy

(Caveat, caveat, caveat: I know that buying short or long doesn't necessarily have to do with time and has to do with value, but for simplification purposes in this specific case for my dear non-finance friends this is the "get the gist" simplification)

The narrative genius about all of this is that GameStop has a cultural nostalgia for a (largely male) millennial generation with nothing to lose and a lot of rage at financial systems