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Who is Keith Gill, the “Roaring Kitty” pumping up GameStop shares?
GameStop has recently reprised the stock frenzy that gripped the video game retailer in 2021, when the company’s share soared as much as 2,000%. Then, as now, the man driving the original “meme stock” is Keith Gill, an amateur trader whose power to move markets stems from his popularity on social media.
Read on to learn more about Gill.
Who is Keith Gill?
Keith Patrick Gill is a financial analyst turned social media influencer who has acquired a massive audience among retail investors. Known on YouTube as “Roaring Kitty” and as “DeepF—Value” on Reddit, he recently rekindled investor interest in GameStop, a money-losing video game chain, with a cryptic post on X that some took as a symbol of his return to the investing world after a three-year hiatus.
The post, an image of a sketched man leaning forward in a chair, was followed by a series of other posts featuring comeback-themed music and movie clips. That was enough to send GameStop shares skyrocketing from $22.91 a share at the end of May to $32.80 on Monday.
Gill’s ability to influence GameStop shares may have grown so strong that E*Trade is considering banning him from the trading platform, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Born in Massachusetts in 1986, Gill grew up in Brockton with two siblings, according to a bio posted on the website of Stonehill College, his alma mater. He was a standout track athlete at Stonehill, from which he earned a business degree in 2009.
In 2001 testimony at a congressional hearing on the meme stock phenomenon, Gill said he is the first member of his immediate family to earn a college degree. He is married with one child.
What is Gill’s connection to GameStop?
After a stint working with a startup in New Hampshire, Gill returned to Massachusetts, where he dove into a career in financial services. He became a chartered financial analyst and a licensed securities broker. Those credentials eventually landed him a job at MassMutual in 2019. He left the firm in 2021, Reuters reported.
In 2020, Gill began growing his online influencer presence by, among other things, encouraging people to invest in GameStop, whose shares he had started buying the previous year. His social media platforms of choice: Reddit discussion boards and YouTube, where he posted videos about his take on financial markets and undervalued stocks. As Roaring Kitty, notably, Gill was posting videos at a time when Americans were stuck indoors during the pandemic, leading some to try their hands at investing.
“I believed the company was dramatically undervalued by the market,” Gill said in testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in 2021. “The prevailing analysis about GameStop’s impending doom was simply wrong,”
To be sure, Gill earned a lot of money after promoting the purchase of GameStop shares, but he also lost big. In 2021, for example, Gill revealed that he had lost $13 million in a single day from his investments in the game retailer. Gill’s move with GameStop eventually became a cornerstone storyline in the 2023 film “Dumb Money,” where Gill is portrayed by actor Paul Dano.
What is the meme-stock craze?
GameStop was one of several struggling companies, including movie theater chain AMC, Bed Bath & Beyond and Blackberry, that retail investors who congregated on the Reddit forum Wallstreetbets embraced during the pandemic. It was these investors who eventually hung a label on these companies — “meme stocks” — while the movement’s catch phrase was “to the moon.”
In the early days of meme-stock mania, one stated goal of at least some investors was to foil hedge funds and other institutional investors who had had bet against players like GameStop and AMC.
But Gill has denied being motivated by a desire to punish Wall Street.
“I was aware from public reports that a well-known investor, Michael Burry, was interested in GameStop. Because I thought the stock was undervalued, I purchased call options on June 7, 2019. I increased my position throughout much of 2019 and 2020, because as I continued to analyze the company and its prospects, I became increasingly confident that the share price was indeed dramatically undervalued.”
How is GameStop doing as company?
In recent years, GameStop has experienced declining sales amid an industrywide pivot to video game streaming and digital downloads. Before reporting a profit in its most recent quarter, the company had posted seven straight quarterly losses.
But with the help from meme-stock investors, the company in March 2023 turned its first profit in two years. Before then, it had posted seven straight quarterly losses. Cost-cutting measures also helped the retailer conserve cash and gave it more time to find new ways of driving growth, analysts said at the time. Over the long haul, however, GameStop still faces significant challenges as the the gaming industry shifts.
In March, the company reported $5.2 billion in revenue for the 2023 fiscal year, down from $5.9 billion the year prior. GameStop said in a regulatory filing last month that it sold a new batch of 45 million shares of the company, an amount that will generate about $933.4 million in fresh capital. As of February, GameStop had 4,169 locations, of which 2,915 are in the U.S. GameStop named Chewy founder Ryan Cohen as its new CEO last fall.
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Oklahoma attorney general says state schools superintendent cannot mandate students watch prayer video
The Oklahoma attorney general’s office responded after the state’s education superintendent sent an email this week to public school administrators requiring them to show students his video announcement of a new Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism. In the video, he prays for President-elect Trump.
Ryan Walters, a Republican, announced the new office on Wednesday and on Thursday sent the email to school superintendents statewide. The new department will be within the state’s Department of Education. Walters said it would “oversee the investigation of abuses to individual religious freedom or displays of patriotism.”
“In one of the first steps of the newly created department, we are requiring all of Oklahoma schools to play the attached video to all kids that are enrolled,” according to the email. Districts were also told to send the video to all parents of students.
In the video, Walters says religious liberty has been attacked and patriotism mocked “by woke teachers unions,” then prays for the leaders of the United States after saying students do not have to join in the prayer.
Sue Ogrocki / AP
“In particular, I pray for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country,” Walters said.
The office of state Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued a statement Friday saying Walters has no authority under state law to issue such a mandate.
“Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights,” said the attorney general’s office spokesperson Phil Bacharach.
Multiple school districts have also said they had no plans to show students the video.
Walters, a former public school teacher elected in 2022, ran on a platform of fighting “woke ideology,” banning books from school libraries and getting rid of “radical leftists” who he claims are indoctrinating children in classrooms. He already faces two lawsuits over his June mandate that schools incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for students in grades 5 through 12. Several school districts have previously stated that they will disregard the mandate.
One of the lawsuits also notes that the initial request for proposal released by the State Department of Education to purchase the Bibles appears to have been tailored to match Bibles endorsed by now President-elect Donald Trump that sell for $59.99 each.
Earlier this week, Walters announced he had purchased more than 500 Bibles to be used in Advanced Placement government classes. The education department that the 500 Bibles are “God Bless the USA Bibles” and were ordered Thursday for about $25,000. They will arrive “in the coming weeks,” the department said.
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Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion for her campaign. She’s still sending persistent appeals to donors after defeat.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s prodigious fundraising operation raised more than $1 billion in her loss to Donald Trump, but the vice president is still pushing donors for more money after the election.
Democrats are sending persistent appeals to Harris supporters without expressly asking them to cover any potential debts, enticing would-be donors instead with other matters: the Republican president-elect’s picks for his upcoming administration and a handful of pending congressional contests where ballots are still being tallied.
“The Harris campaign certainly spent more than they raised and is now busy trying to fundraise,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democratic strategist from Michigan. He said he had been asked by the campaign after its loss to Trump to help with fundraising.
The party is flooding Harris’ lucrative email donor list with near-daily appeals aimed at small-dollar donors — those whose contributions are measured in the hundreds of dollars or less. But Hemond said the postelection effort also includes individual calls to larger donors.
One person familiar with the effort and the Democratic National Committee’s finances said the Harris campaign’s expected shortfall is a relatively small sum compared to the breadth of the campaign, which reported having $119 million cash on hand in mid-October before the Nov. 5 election. That person was not authorized to publicly discuss the campaign’s finances and spoke on condition of anonymity.
But the scramble now underscores the expense involved in a losing effort and the immediate challenges facing Democrats as they try to maintain a baseline political operation to counter the Trump administration and prepare for the 2026 midterm elections. It also calls into question how Democrats used their resources, including hosting events with musicians and other celebrities as well as running ads in a variety of nontraditional spaces such as Las Vegas’ domed Sphere.
Patrick Stauffer, chief financial officer for the Harris campaign, said in a statement that “there were no outstanding debts or bills overdue” on Election Day and there “will be no debt” listed for either the campaign or the DNC on their next financial disclosures, which are due to the Federal Election Commission in December.
The person familiar with the campaign and DNC’s finances said it was impossible to know just where Harris’ balance sheet stands currently. The campaign still is getting invoices from vendors for events and other services from near the end of the race. The campaign also has outstanding receipts; for example, from media organizations that must pay for their employees’ spots on Air Force Two as it traveled for the vice president’s campaign activities.
Within hours of Trump picking Florida Republican Matt Gaetz for attorney general on Wednesday, Harris’ supporters got an appeal for more money for “the Harris Fight Fund,” citing the emerging Trump team and its agenda.
Gaetz, who resigned his House seat after the announcement, “will weaponize the Justice Department to protect themselves,” the email said. It said Democrats “must stop them from executing Trump’s plans for revenge and retribution” and noted that “even his Republican allies are shocked by this” Cabinet choice.
Another appeal followed Friday in Harris’ name.
“The light of America’s promise will burn bright as long as we keep fighting,” the email said, adding that “there are still a number of critical races across the country that are either too close to call or with the margin of recounts or certain legal challenges.”
The emails do not mention Harris’ campaign or its finances.
The “Harris Fight Fund” is a postelection label for the “Harris Victory Fund,” which is the joint fundraising operation of Harris’ campaign, the DNC and state Democratic parties. Despite the language in the recent appeals, most rank-and-file donors’ contributions would be routed to the national party, unless a donor took the time to contact DNC directly and have the money go directly to Harris or a state party.
The fine print at the bottom of the solicitation explains that the first $41,300 from a person and first $15,000 from a political action committee would be allocated to the DNC. The next $3,300 from a person or $5,000 from a PAC would go to the Harris for President “Recount Account.” Anything beyond that threshold, up to maximum contribution limits that can reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, would be spread across state parties.
Officials at the DNC, which is set to undergo a leadership change early next year, indicated the party has no plans to cover any shortfall for Harris but could not explicitly rule out the party shifting any money to the campaign.
