- 9% of Americans bought GameStop stock in 2021.
- 10% bought AMC stock.
- 4 million people held Dogecoin in 2021.
2021 started a trend where social media began to push lower performing stocks of brands people knew and pump them heavily.
The initial goal was the claim of betting against hedge funds shorting the stocks, but eventually became just a giant pump and dump tens of millions were involved with.
Crypto was also an interesting thing, where Elon Musk and other people just tweeting about Dogecoin caused a massive boom, where it broke 40 billion dollars in total market cap at peak. Which Dogecoin is a self admitted joke, designed to parody bitcoin with a meme as a mascot.
Which crypto kept growing heavily, to the point nearly every celebrity pushed it in some form, many doing products such as Crypto .com, but also many like Logan Paul pumping scam dogecoin knockoffs.
That seemed like a fad, but here’s how Elon Musk made it interesting.
COVID is still more or less going on.
Ukraine & Russia are in war.
Congress is in an active investigation of the previous president for the claim he caused an insurrection at the capital.
All of that going on and what’s the number one news story?
Elon Musk buying Twitter.
People found it compelling that a famous person bought a company universally known, with a little controversy around it and it even became in a weird way a battle of people versus MBA’s.
Twitter’s board besides Jack Dorsey owned .2% of the company and was paid 3 million a year.
Twitter had tons of VP’s and upper management paid over $500,000 a year.
Twitter also had various consulting groups for things like diversity or news research, which they spent tens of millions on and arguably did nothing.
People looked into Twitter and saw waste, only for Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world to say he’s going to jump in and do it.
My big question though is now that Elon Musk did it, why can’t famous people do the same thing and develop ways for fans/investors to buy the company for them?
Mr Beast started a burger restaurant for a video, where he gave people money to eat his food.
Eventually a company partnered with him to sell his burgers via delivery, through ghost kitchens.
That has been around for about a year and over one million people in the United States has ordered from his burger business.
This brings in the question, what’s stopping him from saying he wants to buy a major company, fundraise to acquire it through a new company and raise money via an IPO or even release of some sort of crypto, just focused on buying a larger company.
An example being Build a Bear.
The market cap on Build a Bear is 297 million dollars.
Could someone like Mr Beast or another celebrity just get fans to purchase shares of a company devoted 100% to purchasing it and taking it over with a new strategy?
Other examples
- Blue Apron is worth 98 million.
- Planet Fitness is 7.3 billion.
- Peloton is 5.8 billion.
Logic being to just takeover companies and have these celebrities own 10-20% of them, which would make them hundreds of millions overnight if they go through.
There’s also the question of why not just put these people in charge, but reason is not really enough to offer them.
The CEO of Build a Bear made $640,000 last year.
To get a veteran entrepreneur or big creator online interested, they’d need well over 10x as much money.
Writing this post, it’s more of an idea, but could become a reality, if the financial instruments are put in place and some lower market cap companies see the potential in a quick cash out, relying on the public versus large firms to acquire them.