Badasstrader 🏴‍☠️

KANEDA... what do you FUCKING SEE???? #GME #Gamestop $GME $EBAY reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comm…

KANEDA... WHAT DO YOU SEEE??? #GME #Gamestop reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comm…

It's an ego play

Every short thesis built on "GameStop is a dying retailer" evaporates at the moment the deal closes. Bring on the DEF 14A @ryancohen #GME #Gamestop $GME #Ebay

I love the contrast of the CNBC interview to this: youtube.com/watch?v=RuRH6ULo… Masterful #GME #Gamestop $GME #Ebay @ryancohen

This is fucking mastery. @ryancohen #Gamestop #GME $GME #Ebay youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj2PaxX…

KANEDA... #GME #Gamestop $GME #Ebay reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comm…

If everyone could just cop the fuck on and stop starting wars and killing each other...

Any ideas #AMC?

No... @ryancohen is not buying #AMC

A summary of the counterarguments to this being debunked: "RC's clearly working on something big, so he has a well thought solution for insider trading" - The solution is not having a specific deal yet. Which kills the DD. "GameStop isn't involved until the deal is done, RC/others are working on BBBY comeback separately" - Doesn't matter. If RC is personally engineering an acquisition for GameStop, he knows it's a GameStop transaction. Every GME share he buys while knowing that is insider trading. "GME, RC, and RK have all invested 5% in IEP secretly" - Any 5%+ stake requires a public 13D/13G filing. GameStop's investments are reported in their quarterly filings. None of this exists. "His buys could be proven in good faith" - Good faith isn't a statutory defense. The test is objective: did you possess MNPI at the time of the trade? "Just pay the $2M fine like Wall Street does" - CEO systematically buying his own stock while engineering a multi-billion dollar merger is criminal prosecution territory (DOJ, not just SEC). Every comparable case at scale went criminal. "DK Butterfly isn't publicly traded" - The insider trading problem is on the GME side, not the target side. "RC hasn't bid yet" - Then the DD is wrong. And if he's been planning to bid, knowing the specific target is itself material even without final terms. "RC doesn't know what he's able to acquire" - According to the DD, he still knows the specific target is DK Butterfly's NOLs. Knowing the target is itself material even if the final value is uncertain. "An acquisition doesn't necessarily mean share price goes up" - The DD claims it triggers the largest short squeeze in history and catapults GME to $100B. "Pre-set plan safe harbor" - His Form 4s show discretionary open market buys, not 10b5-1 trades. "Sixth Street is the owner, they file, not RC" - Irrelevant. The problem is RC buying GME shares while knowing what GME is about to acquire. "NDAs are common in M&A" - NDAs create MNPI. That's literally the "non-public" part. "Business judgment rule protects him" - That's corporate governance law protecting board decisions, not securities law. Has nothing to do with insider trading. "RC already owns the shell through Sixth Street, so no insider trading" - Makes it worse. Buying GME while possessing MNPI about merging an entity he secretly controls is still insider trading. Hiding ownership behind a financial partner is concealment is an aggravating factor, not a loophole. "Taking a position in the market isn't insider trading" - Nobody said it was. Taking a position while possessing MNPI about that security is. To be clear... There is no way for @ryancohen to have #Gamestop be part of a merger with Butterfly without RC being guilty of Insider trading. Full Stop.

2 Hours to read this DD... Debunked in the first 2 paragraphs. @ryancohen has been buying GME shares on the open market as CEO. If he's sitting on a plan to merge #GameStop with a $880M tax shield entity that would simultaneously trigger "the largest short squeeze in market history" and catapult the company toward $100B market cap... then every single #GME purchase he's made while planning this, is insider trading. Full stop.

And now he's long @ryancohen Nice. #GME

Lol

The Strip Miners Private equity is the most elegant theft in the history of American capitalism. We have taken the Hollow Men of the boardroom and given them something far more dangerous than a corporate expense account. We have given them leverage—other people's money, other people's companies, and other people's jobs—and we have told them to extract as much value as they can before the music stops. By "Private Equity," I am not referring to the original concept—wealthy operators pooling capital to buy and build businesses. That model had integrity. I am referring to the modern financial engineering machine: an industry managing over $9 trillion in assets that buys companies with borrowed money, strips them for parts, and sells the wreckage back to the public markets at a markup. These are the strip miners of the American economy. They do not build. They do not invent. They do not compete. They acquire, leverage, and extract. And they have constructed the most lopsided compensation structure in the history of finance to do it. Let us start with the fee structure, because this is where the con begins. The standard Private Equity model is called "2 and 20." The fund charges a 2% annual management fee on total committed capital, plus 20% of all profits above a hurdle rate. Let's be brutally honest about what those numbers represent. A $10 billion fund collects $200 million per year in management fees before it makes a single investment. Over a typical ten-year fund life, that is $2 billion paid to the general partners simply for existing. This fee is not tied to performance. It is not refundable if the fund loses money. It is collected whether the partners are working eighteen-hour days or playing golf in the Hamptons. The management fee alone makes the partners rich. The "20" makes them obscene. The carried interest—that 20% profit share—is taxed not as income, but as capital gains. A billionaire fund manager who risks nothing of his own capital pays a lower tax rate than the factory workers in the companies he is dismembering. Congress has debated closing this loophole for twenty years. The loophole remains. The lobbying budget is larger than the tax revenue at stake. This is not capitalism. It is a toll booth on other people's risk. But the fees are just the appetizer. The real damage happens inside the portfolio companies. Here's the Private Equity playbook, stripped of its euphemisms: Step One: Buy a company using mostly borrowed money. A typical leveraged buyout uses 60-70% debt. The PE firm puts in $3 billion of equity and borrows $7 billion. But the critical detail that most people miss—the debt is placed on the company's balance sheet, not the fund's. The acquired company is forced to borrow billions to finance its own purchase. It is like buying a house, then forcing the house to take out the mortgage. Step Two: Immediately extract cash. Within months of closing the deal, many PE firms pay themselves a "special dividend"—funded by the company taking on even more debt. In some cases, the firm recovers its entire equity investment within two years, while the company struggles under a debt load it never asked for. This is called a "dividend recapitalization." A more honest term would be looting. Step Three: Cut everything that does not show up in next quarter's EBITDA. Fire experienced workers and replace them with cheaper labor. Slash R&D. Defer maintenance. Renegotiate supplier contracts by threatening to walk. Sell the real estate and lease it back. Every dollar cut from operations flows directly to EBITDA, which inflates the valuation multiple, which makes the fund's returns look better on paper. Step Four: Sell the hollowed shell to the next buyer—another PE firm, the public markets through an IPO, or a strategic acquirer—at a higher multiple than you paid. The new buyer inherits a company that is thinner, more fragile, and loaded with debt it cannot service in a downturn. If it works, the fund reports a 25% IRR and the partners collect hundreds of millions in carried interest. If it fails—and PE-backed companies now account for over half of all large U.S. bankruptcies, reaching 70% in the first quarter of 2025—the partners keep every dollar of management fees they already collected. They keep the dividend recaps. They keep the monitoring fees and the transaction fees and the advisory fees they charged the company for the privilege of being gutted. (And OF COURSE they have become experts at extracting maximum value from the Bankruptcy itself) Moody's found that PE-backed companies default at twice the rate of non-PE-backed companies. In 2024 alone, PE-related bankruptcies resulted in at least 65,850 layoffs across the country. Heads, the fund wins. Tails, the company dies... AND the fund wins anyway. The human cost of this machine is staggering, and we have been trained not to see it. When a PE firm buys a hospital chain and cuts nursing staff to hit margin targets, patients die in understaffed wards. Studies have found that PE ownership of nursing homes is associated with a 10% increase in mortality among Medicare patients—a finding confirmed by every systematic review through 2025. No peer-reviewed study has ever found that PE ownership improves healthcare quality, efficiency, costs, or access. These are not statistics. They are grandmothers. When a PE firm buys a retail chain and loads it with $5 billion in debt to fund a dividend recap, the chain cannot invest in e-commerce, cannot renovate stores, cannot compete. It enters a death spiral. Toys "R" Us. Payless ShoeSource. Party City. Joann. Claire's. Forever 21. The obituary list grows longer every quarter—Joann filed for bankruptcy twice in ten months, the second time liquidating and laying off 19,000 workers. Each name represents thousands of workers who lost their jobs not because the business was unviable, but because it was suffocated by debt it was forced to carry so that the fund could extract its fees early. When a PE firm buys a software company and triples the price while halving the support team, every customer pays more for less. When they buy a veterinary clinic chain and pressure veterinarians to upsell unnecessary procedures, your dog pays too. This is not creative destruction. This is extractive destruction. The companies do not fail because the market has moved on. They fail because they have been bled dry from the inside by owners who were never owners at all—just temporary custodians with a financial incentive to take everything that is not bolted down. And here's perhaps the most perverse element of the entire system: the people supplying the money are the ones being hurt the most. The largest investors in private equity funds are public pension systems. The California teachers' retirement fund. The New York firefighters' pension. State employee funds across all fifty states. These institutions—managing the retirement savings of nurses, teachers, police officers, and civil servants—hand hundreds of billions to PE firms, which use that capital to buy companies and fire workers who belong to the same economic class as the pension beneficiaries. A teacher in Ohio is funding, through her own pension, the leveraged buyout of a company that will lay off a thousand workers in her state. Her pension manager approved this allocation because the PE firm's marketing materials promised "superior risk-adjusted returns." But do they deliver? After you subtract the management fees, the carried interest, the transaction fees, the monitoring fees, and the fund expenses—after you account for the leverage that artificially inflates returns—a growing body of research shows that median PE fund returns have converged with public equity markets. Bain & Company's 2025 report found that U.S. buyout 10-year returns have fallen three percentage points in North America, with the S&P 500's 23% surge in 2024 further compressing the gap. The typical pension fund, paying premium fees for illiquid investments, would have done just as well buying an index fund and going home. The PE firm captured the alpha. The pension captured the risk. The defenders of Private Equity will tell you that these firms are disciplined operators. That they impose accountability. That they force bloated companies to become lean. This is the mythology, and it is collapsing. The "operational improvement" story was plausible in the 1980s, when PE firms were small, deals were few, and genuine turnaround expertise was rare. Today, the industry manages over $9 trillion in assets across more than 18,000 funds, with another $1.2 trillion in dry powder waiting to be deployed. PE-owned firms employ over 12 million U.S. workers and account for 6.5% of U.S. GDP. The industry has scaled far beyond the supply of operational talent. The average partner at a major firm sits on a half-dozen boards, just like the Hollow Men of the corporate world. They are not operating these companies. They are financially engineering them. The primary "value creation" lever is not better management—it is leverage, multiple expansions, and cost cutting. Research from MSCI found that sector tilts and replicable market exposures explain nearly half of PE's outperformance over public markets—not operational improvement. Strip away the leverage and the rising tide, and you are left with an industry that charges premium fees for index-like returns—while imposing illiquidity, opacity, and catastrophic downside risk on the companies it touches. We must also address the revolving door that protects this machine from accountability. Former SEC officials join PE firms as partners. Former PE executives join the SEC as regulators. Congressional staffers who write financial regulation leave Capitol Hill for PE lobbying shops paying five times their government salary. In the 2024 election cycle, eleven private equity billionaires alone poured $223 million into political spending — more than double what 147 PE firms spent in the entire 2016 cycle. Twenty-six members of Congress have over $150 million collectively invested in PE funds—the same funds they are supposed to regulate. (That we know about). The carried interest loophole survives not because it is defensible on merits but because the people who could close it are either paid by the industry or hoping to be. The Congressional Budget Office estimates closing the loophole would raise $14 billion over ten years. The industry spends a fraction of that to keep it open. This is regulatory capture, perfected. And when a PE-backed company fails spectacularly—when workers lose their jobs, when creditors take pennies on the dollar, when communities lose their anchor employers—no one at the fund faces any consequence whatsoever. The general partners are shielded by the fund structure. The limited partners bear the investment loss. The company's employees bear the human loss. The fund raises the next vehicle, larger than the last, because institutional investors have short memories and long allocation mandates. There is no accountability because there was never any liability. The original sin of Private Equity is the same as the original sin of the Hollow Men: the separation of authority from consequence. The PE partner who decides to load a company with debt does not lose his house if the company goes bankrupt. The PE partner who decides to cut the maintenance budget at a nursing home does not sleep in that nursing home. The PE partner who decides to fire three thousand workers to hit an EBITDA target does not stand in the unemployment line. They are playing a game where all the upside flows to them and all the downside flows to everyone else. The management fees guarantee wealth. The carried interest guarantees obscene wealth. The fund structure guarantees that failure is always someone else's problem. In a functioning economy, if you borrow $7 billion to buy a company and the company fails, you should face ruin. That fear of ruin is what separates an investor from a speculator, an owner from a strip miner. The time for polite institutional allocations is over. If we want to stop the slow hollowing of the American economy, we must demand three things: First, tax carried interest as ordinary income. If a fund manager's "profit share" walks like a paycheck and talks like a paycheck, tax it like a paycheck. End the fiction that a billionaire who risks none of his own capital deserves a lower tax rate than his secretary. Second, require meaningful GP co-investment. If the general partners will not put at least 10-20% of their own net worth into every deal, they should not be making the deal. Skin in the game is the only honest regulator. Third, hold PE sponsors liable for the debt they impose. If a fund loads a company with unsustainable leverage to fund a dividend recap, and that company subsequently fails, the fund should be on the hook for the damage—not just the equity it invested, but the pensions that were raided, the workers who were fired, and the communities that were gutted. We need to end the era of the Strip Miner. We need investors who buy companies to build them, not bleed them. We need capital that creates, not capital that extracts. Because an economy that rewards extraction over creation is an economy that is eating itself. And we have been feeding the machine for forty years. It is time to turn it off. #GME #Gamestop Sources: NBER Working Paper 28474 — Gupta, Howell, Yannelis, Gupta — 10% mortality increase at PE-owned nursing homes, 20,150 excess deaths nber.org/digest/202104/how-p… Private Equity Stakeholder Project — Bankruptcy Tracker (October 2025) — 56% of large bankruptcies PE-backed, 65,850 layoffs, Moody's 2x default rate pestakeholder.org/reports/pr… Bain & Company — Global Private Equity Report 2025 — 10-year returns fell 3 points in North America, convergence with public markets bain.com/insights/outlook-is… MSCI — "Tracking Private Equity: Closing the Performance Gap" — Sector tilts and replicable exposures explain nearly half of PE outperformance msci.com/research-and-insigh… Jacobin / Common Dreams / OpenSecrets data — $223M in 2024 political spending from just 11 PE billionaires, 26 members of Congress with $150M+ invested in PE funds commondreams.org/opinion/pri… jacobin.com/2024/10/lawmaker…

$1 Trillion dollars... #GME youtube.com/watch?v=lRArbRr-…

Jake confirms Gameshire "Bathaway" is debunked #GME