Billionaires, bold bets, and young men made the election feel like 2021’s meme-stock saga — just way bigger

Joe Rogan at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Texas.

Elon Musk and Mark Cuban trumpet their picks and excite their followers on social media. Amateur traders scramble to place speculative bets. Disaffected young men post memes to rally support for their revolution against the elites.

That may sound like a description of the frenzied days leading up to the US presidential election this week. It could also describe the meme-stock craze of early 2021.

The two events have striking similarities. Both featured celebrity billionaires championing their favorites. Musk tweeted “GameStonk!!” at the height of the short squeeze on GameStop’s stock in January 2021, then a few days later he posted “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto,” causing the prices of both assets to spike.

This September, the Tesla CEO posted on X, “Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny.”

Similarly, in February 2021, Cuban thanked members of Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum for “changing the game” and “taking on Wall Street.” Two months later, the “Shark Tank” star tweeted that dogecoin was the “one coin that people actually use for transactions.”

Cuban threw his weight behind Kamala Harris going into the election, praising the Democratic candidate and criticizing Trump in several since-deleted X posts.

Neil Wilson, the chief market analyst at Finalto, told B-17 that the election conversation this year had “hallmarks of the kind of vibes-based, personality-based cultish side.”

Trading frenzy

Retail traders bet big on both occasions. They piled into beaten-down stocks, SPACs, cryptocurrencies, and other high-risk assets in early 2021. Similarly, they plowed millions of dollars into Polymarket and other prediction-betting markets before the polls closed and Trump secured victory.

Stars emerged both times. Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill became the face of the GameStop craze for ostensibly making tens of millions of dollars on the video-game retailer’s stock. A French trader known as Théo racked up similar profits betting on Trump via Polymarket.

Young men played an outsize role in both sagas. In 2021, they flocked to the Wall Street Bets subreddit and other social media to share their stock picks, exchange funny memes, and post screenshots of their wins and losses. Their motives ranged from wanting to get rich quickly to having a laugh to fighting back against the Wall Street elite they saw as bullying the businesses of their childhood.

Winning men

Men under 30 rallied behind Trump en masse this year, framing his campaign as a common-sense revolution against an oppressive establishment, lying media, and an unfair system. They used memes and AI-generated artwork to paint Trump and those around him as superheroes and patriotic titans.

LAST PUSH pic.twitter.com/iJ3Hw3Vz4J

— beeple (@beeple) November 5, 2024

Trump and Musk galvanized young men through posting on X, speaking to “manosphere” stars such as Joe Rogan, and promoting traditional masculine ideals. The upshot was a stark shift among men under 30 toward Republicans compared with previous elections.

“It is hard not to attribute momentum gains in Trump support among younger male voters to Musk’s or Rogan’s endorsements,” Mark Malek, the chief investment officer at Siebert, told B-17.

He likened the trend to Musk’s touting of dogecoin, which boosted the dog-themed crypto. Malek added that Wall Street traders watched the swings in election betting markets to assess the state of the presidential race and inform their investments.

Memes with meaning

Naeem Aslam, the chief investment officer at Zaye Capital Markets, told B-17 he saw “strong similarities” between the two events but with some twists this time.

In 2021, Wall Street Bets “aimed at the money bigwigs, rallying against hedge funds,” he said. “But now the target list has grown. It’s not just Wall Street in the crosshairs. Washington, the media, and what many call the ‘establishment’ are all fair game.

“The meme-driven buzz from 2021 has returned, but now it’s mixed with a strong ideological element making today’s speculative scene wider and longer-lasting.”

Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social whose majority shareholder is the president-elect, unites several of these ideas. It became a proxy for Trump’s chance of returning to the White House, and it has swung dramatically in recent days.

Tesla stock also surged on Wednesday after Trump won, even as other clean-energy stocks tanked in anticipation of a less green administration. Malek said it was clear that “some sort of premium has been placed on the stock as a result of Musk’s very public involvement in Trump’s campaign.”

“Tesla is by no means a meme stock,” he added, “but its recent move certainly has notes of one.”

There are clear parallels between the meme-stock mania of early 2021 and the social-media chatter and betting-platform activity going into the election. But it’s worth acknowledging the differences in scale and stakes.

“One is selecting someone to run a country and make decisions that will affect millions of people’s lives,” Dan Coatsworth, an investment analyst at AJ Bell, told B-17. “The other is about a relatively small group of people hoping to make a quick buck.”