After a three-year hiatus following one of the most revolutionary stock market culture sweeps in recent memory, the standard-bearer of 2021’s GameStop surge, Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill, has returned to social media.
As trading opened this morning, May 13, news of Gill’s reemergence has caused GameStop stock ($GME) to surge upwards of 70 percent, at time of writing.
Roaring Kitty’s return to social media was sparked late last night when he posted the well-known meme of a gamer sitting up in their chair with an arrow pointing forward. He later followed up this morning with another meme reel, capped off with a scene from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which Wolverine rises out of a submerged water tank and roars, fully signaling that he’s back and out of his slumber. He also posted a scene from Breaking Bad in which Walter White threateningly tells Saul Goodman “we’re done when I say we’re done.”
Although Gill has not made any official statement as of yet, and his YouTube channel hasn’t been uploaded to since 2021, he’ll likely post some sort of update to his legion of fans within the coming days. The folks over on the WallStreetBets subreddit—who practically worshiped Gill’s original analysis and amassed by the millions during the original GameStop pop—have already begun to slip back into their 2021 form.
Countless posts of traders “yoloing” their money on GameStop calls and purchases have begun to flood the subreddit again, just as they did three years ago. Rallying cries of “we are so back” have driven the conversation over there en masse during today’s trading day.
In the down years since Gill took his hiatus from the internet, his story—and the stories of countless winners and losers from the great GameStop saga of 2021—was adapted into a feature film, Dumb Money, which starred Paul Dano as Gill alongside Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen, and others. The film signaled a happy ending for Gill, who very happily sold a portion of his shares for millions of dollars and disappeared from the face of the Earth. But a return today could signal another chapter in the trader’s story.
In addition to GameStop, other “meme stocks” pioneered by internet communities, notably those on Reddit, including AMC ($AMC), Build-a-Bear Workshop ($BBW), BlackBerry ($BB), and others, were positively impacted by some traders back in 2021. AMC’s stock has already risen 33 percent today as well, at time of writing.