Mets Owner Steven Cohen Deletes Twitter Account After Threats

Earlier this week, an unknown but sizable number of small investors, whipped into a frenzy on places like Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, drove up the stock price of the struggling video game retailer GameStop in part, in an effort to punish deep-pocketed investors who had bet heavily that its value would fall.

The surge of small investors quickly sent GameStop’s stock price from less than $20 a share to about $325 a share as of Friday. For hedge funds that had taken positions against GameStop, expecting that the value of the shares would fall (in what is known as shorting the stock), the stock’s sudden rise cost them billions.

One of the biggest losers may have been Cohen.

Cohen’s hedge fund, Point72, had invested nearly a billion dollars in Melvin Capital, another hedge fund led by a former Point72 employee. Melvin Capital had shorted GameStop stock, and so as its value rose Melvin Capital sustained losses so large that it required a $2.75 billion rescue from other investors, including another $750 million from Point72.

Point72 has lost 15 percent of its value this year, The New York Times has reported.

All of this led to some Twitter users to question if Cohen was really their deep-pocketed savior, or whether his hedge fund’s losses would reduce his willingness to spend on the team.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/sports/baseball/steve-cohen-mets-gamestop-barstool.html