Just weeks after Keith Gill—the leader behind the famous 2021 GameStop short squeeze—staged an eventful return to the internet, it looks like he’s got his sights set on a brand-new source of meme-stock fodder: Chewy, the online pet goods retailer.
Gill foreshadowed his investments in Chewy in his usual cryptic style, with a caption-less photo of an animated dog posted to his Roaring Kitty X (formerly Twitter) account last Thursday. His followers appeared to make sense of the image fairly quickly, spiking Chewy’s stock price to a near one-year high that same day.
Then, this morning, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shed new light on Gill’s tweet after a filing showed that he had purchased over nine million shares in Chewy, or about a 6.6% total stake.
Predictably, the filing sent Gill’s followers into another frenzy and drove Chewy’s shares up by nearly 20% in premarket trading. However, they fell back down pretty quickly and were trading at almost 5% lower by midday.
The recent interest in Chewy is the newest (albeit most unexpected) chapter in Gill’s return to the internet this year, which has already involved multiple attempts to revive public interest in GameStop stock on both X and Reddit.
His repeated posts have sent GameStop’s stock prices on a wild roller coaster of ups and downs, despite the company’s increasingly dismal future prospects: According to its first-quarter earnings report, released on June 7, sales dropped 28% to $881.8 million from $1.24 billion in the same period last year.
Gill’s bread and butter is in popularizing meme stocks, which are typically defined as stocks that take off through social media discourse. Now, it looks like he might be trying something similar with Chewy (which, notably, was also founded by GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen). Chewy’s current finances aren’t nearly as grim as GameStop’s: Although sales were slow in a post-pandemic slump, the company’s shares have risen by 15% so far in 2024.
But, as Gill’s chaotic recent posts have demonstrated, it’s difficult to predict exactly how his endorsement might impact the company in the next few weeks (or days, for that matter).