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Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill buys $245 million stake in Chewy
Keith Gill, the meme stock investor who sent GameStop shares surging during the pandemic, has taken out a multimillion stake in Chewy.
Gill, who goes by the moniker “Roaring Kitty” on X and “DeepF——Value” on Reddit, bought more than 9 million shares of the online pet supply giant, according to a regulatory filing posted Monday. Based on Chewy’s share price Friday, which was $27.24, Gill’s purchase means he now has a $245 million stake in the company. Chewy’s stock price surged as much as 15% Monday on news of Gill’s investment.
Chewy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
That investment comes a week after, Gill posted an image of a cartoon dog with no accompanying text on his Roaring Kitty X account. The post gave shares of Chewy, PetMed Express and Petco a temporary jolt.
Gill’s puppy post came a day after Chewy announced it would spend $500 million to repurchase 17.5 million of its own shares. Companies typically buy back shares to boost their per-share earnings or to increase returns for existing shareholders.
Roaring Kitty has become known for making the markets move simply by posting cryptic images on social media. Last month, after the end of a roughly three-year hiatus from social media, Roaring Kitty once again caused GameStop shares to soar after it posted an image of a sketched man leaning forward in a chair on X. The post was followed by several others, featuring various comeback-themed videos and movie clips with charged music.
Gill’s online influence was established in 2021, after he rallied hordes of amateur investors online to invest in the struggling video game retailer GameStop, causing shares — which Gill had started buying the previous year — to soar, in what became known as the first meme-stock frenzy.
“I believed [GameStop] 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 profited after promoting the purchase of GameStop shares, but he also later lost big. In 2021, for example, Gill revealed that he had lost $13 million in a single day when shares of the game retailer retreated.
Gill’s investments in GameStop eventually became a cornerstone storyline in the 2023 film “Dumb Money,” where Gill is portrayed by actor Paul Dano.
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Pharrell Williams on “Piece by Piece” and his love of joy
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Pharrell Williams on “Piece by Piece” and his love of joy
On a rainy day in Paris, Pharrell Williams was at the headquarters of Louis Vuitton living the dream, at an office he prefers to call “a dream space.”
Last February, Williams was appointed the Men’s Creative Director. He oversees a staff of 200, and has already launched four new collections. His most recent, at UNESCO, paid tribute to the variety of the human race.
Asked what is most satisfying watching his designs come down the runway, Williams said, “You’re gonna hate this answer: All of it!” he laughed. “Come on, man. It’s a dream!”
For more than three decades he’s been helping to make some of pop music’s biggest hits, from Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” while helping to bridge the gap between pop culture and high fashion.
He says the runway is just another way for him to show people who he is: “I always want to evoke a sense of joy, ’cause I feel like the world, there’s a deficit of joy.”
Sanneh asked, “But I imagine you do still have to pay attention to, ‘Are people buying these clothes that I made?'”
“Sure; that’s when you start questioning the success,” Williams said. “But like, man, you gotta enjoy it. If you enjoy it, nine times out of ten, somebody else gonna enjoy it.”
Now there’s something new to enjoy: “Piece by Piece,” an animated Lego movie about Williams’ life, directed by the award-winning documentarian Morgan Neville. Last month, at the Toronto Film Festival, Williams said he still can’t believe he got to make this film. “I’m from a marginalized community where we often hear the word ‘no’ all the time,” he said. “For whatever reason, [for ‘Piece by Piece’], we got a lot of yeses.”
“This seems like one of your superpowers is getting people to say ‘yes’ to things they might otherwise say ‘no’ to,” said Sanneh.
“It wasn’t that hard; it’s just harder for people who look like me,” Williams replied. “But when we tell it in Lego, now it’s universal. Replace Black with LGBTQIA, or Indian, or Asian, or short, or plus size, or anything. LEGO is the great equalizer.”
To watch a trailer for “Piece by Piece,” click on the video player below:
As a boy growing up in a Virginia Beach apartment complex, Williams, a self-described misfit, saw and heard the world differently than most people, through a condition called synesthesia, by which he “sees” the colors of sound: “For me, sight and sound are still connected, so they send ghost images to each other. It’s a condition, but also at the same time it’s a gift, because I don’t know how I would make music if I couldn’t see it. That’s the way that I conceptualize it.”
With his childhood friend Chad Hugo, he formed a duo called The Neptunes. They were discovered by the music producer Teddy Riley, who saw them perform at a high school talent show. In 1992, around the time of his 19th birthday, Williams helped Riley write a hit single called “Rump Shaker,” recorded by the hip-hop group Wreckx-N-Effect.
Williams said, “If it wasn’t for Teddy Riley, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. ‘Cause I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where there was no music studio or music industry or anything like that.”
The Neptunes produced a string of hits, and then Williams branched out on his own, becoming a real pop star. His voice was everywhere, although Williams himself had mixed feelings about it: “I had a song called ‘Beautiful’ with Snoop, right? Girls heard me singing that; I heard Mickey Mouse! I swear to you, when you just get a moment and you just listen, you’ll never be able to un-hear it again. But that’s what I hear.”
“Sexy Mickey Mouse?” asked Sanneh.
“No, not sexy, just Mickey Mouse. It was wild for me.”
By the early 2000s, Williams says he felt lost: “I had moved away from being a student, and things became too formulaic. And that was troubling to my spirit, and I could no longer feel what I was doing.”
He rebounded by being a bit more open to new ideas – working with Daft Punk on “Get Lucky,” and Robin Thicke on “Blurred Lines.”
“Get Lucky” by Daft Punk featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers:
The producers of “Despicable Me 2” asked him to write a song for the soundtrack … something happy. “I would’ve never written a song called ‘Happy,'” he said. “It was commissioned for me to do. And on top of that, I didn’t think I was gonna have any more, like, hit records. The universe was like, ‘Well, not only are you wrong about that, but I’m gonna have three different commissions come from three different places, and these are gonna be the biggest records for you.’ It just humbled me because it was like, I couldn’t be pompous. I couldn’t be arrogant.”
“Happy” by Pharrell Williams:
Naturally, Williams, now 51, created the theme song for the new movie “Piece by Piece”:
He’s put a music studio in his office, so he can make songs while simultaneously working on the next Louis Vuitton collection. But he says he never feels as if he’s on the clock.
Asked if the pressure to create takes some of the joy out of it, Williams replied, “It’s not a pressure; it’s a privilege. You can’t go wrong when your aim is to enjoy what you do. You can’t go wrong.”
For more info:
Story produced by Robbyn McFadden. Editor: Steven Tyler.
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Election officials on threats to your right to vote
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