(Fortune) - Did you wake up on a Monday morning thinking today’s the day you joke about losing over $50 million in a matter of hours? If you’re Roaring Kitty, alias Keith Gill, the answer is yes.
After GameStop shares closed 12% lower for the session, the YOLO king of the WallStreetBets community posted a screenshot showing his risky bet on the meme stock suffered another hefty drop in value.
The $17 million he lost on his 5 million shares in the company—according to his Reddit post, where he’s known as DeepF--kingValue—was the least of his concerns. The drop in the underlying asset triggered an even larger swing in the value of his derivatives position, which fell an additional $34.5 million.
There’s a reason why his dated GameStop posts are all titled “YOLO update,” short for You Only Live Once, the credo of meme-stock speculators who emphasize a get-rich-or-die-trying mentality.
That’s because Gill already watched on Friday as the grand total of $300 million went up in smoke before him, right when he was on the cusp of becoming a billionaire on paper.
GameStop foils short squeeze with share issue
His apparent attempt to trigger a massive short squeeze in GameStop and catapult the value of his holdings into the 10-digits was foiled after the company launched a surprise stock offer that flooded the market with as many as 75 million newly issued shares. The news sent the GameStop price tumbling 40% on Friday, leaving it well below the threshold needed by Gill.
Fortunately, he seems to take it all with humor. “You were a billionaire,” Gill wrote on Monday in a self-deprecating post seen by over 5 million users on X, formerly Twitter.
It’s unclear what the next move is for the 38-year-old, whose 2021 battle with GameStop short-sellers like hedge fund Melvin Capital was immortalized last year on the silver screen in Dumb Money.
After a three-year-long absence, Gill burst back onto the scene on May 13 with a series of memes on social media, effectively announcing the fight wasn’t over until he said so.
On June 2, he then revealed he had amassed a GameStop position in stock and call options worth over $181 million.
By Christiaan Hetzner
