Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: GameStop Doesn’t Have Enough Stock

GameStop!

Well! Yes! This is the point! Of everything! Like:

1. You do good business stuff;
2. Your stock goes up;
3. Now your stock is worth a lot of money;
4. You use your valuable stock to buy things — executive talent, other companies — that help you do more good business stuff.

A virtuous and self-reinforcing cycle. Step 2 is not, perhaps, the most important part of all of this, but it’s not the least important either. At some point in early 2021 the mad scientists at GameStop Corp. realized, somewhat to their own chagrin, that their stock was going up quite a lot for ...