The movie theater chain became a popular meme stock that has a large following. This increased attacks on the financial journalist.
His opponents are the Apes — retail investor fanboys who keep blindly beating their chests that the company’s stock is “going to the moon.”The rocket ship emoji is used by them to indicate that the stock closed Wednesday at $7.67 and could one day reach its potential heights. All-time high of $77 for June 2021At the height of the meme stock surge. AMC’s shares and APEs now trade for a combined $11 (oddly, APE closed at $3.37 although each unit represents the exact same stake in the overall company). Even combined, that’s nowhere near the $1,000 that some of the Ape investors were predicting.
And they’ve been attacking Gasparino because he told the truth — shareholders were facing a major dilution in the stock. Here is where entertainment, journalism, and Twitter collide.
Gasparino is combative (full disclosure: I’ve known him for years as a colleague in financial journalism and he once told me on Twitter I lived in my “mother’s basement.”As a former professional fighter, he is well-versed in boxing and can land a punch, as well as take one. He’s a hardscrabble financial journalist with a Wall Street source list full of CEOs, traders and bankers accumulated in a decades-long career at the Journal, CNBC and now Fox.
He Warning on the cable news network His 154,000 social media followers that AMC boss Adam Aron was misleading investors — raising billions by selling new stock during the pandemic until shareholders earlier this year expressed they didn’t support the company’s planto issue even more. Gasparino raised the alarm about Aron’s plans to reduce common shareholders.
AMC then authorized pre-existing shareholder approvals to issue preferred equity unit, also known as APEs. Gasparino once again warned of more shareholder dilution. The cinema chainIn filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission Mondaythat it could issue 425 million APEs and use proceeds to repay some its massive $5.5 billion in debt or make other investments.
The nation’s No. This cinema chain boasts 636 locations and 8,094 screens. “Extreme fluctuations in the market price”APE units and common stock “have been accompanied by reports of strong and atypical retail investor interest, including on social media and online forums.” (A rep for AMC didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)
And you don’t even want to know the frantic posts that whipsawed social media sites like Twitter and Discord when AMC made the eye-rolling decision in March to buy a 22% stake in a mining company for about $28 million. The kind that seeks silver and gold, not crypto mining. Aroncalled the investment “a bold diversification move.”
Both investors and analysts were confused. Eric Handler, an entertainment analyst at MKM Partners, stated that the company was confusing investors. “investing valuable capital into a very speculative venture”This is it “outside of its core competencies.”
Gasparino declined to comment for this story and referred to Fox’s spokesperson. In a recent however, column for The New York Post, he summed up how meme stocks — a nod to the proliferation of the funny images, videos and text that’s spread rapidly on the internet — upended the market.
“It also distorted reality. Retail, armed with Reddit message-board ‘research,’ drank the Kool-Aid,”He wrote. “The meme-stock frenzy that began inJanuary 2021 seemedto prove their point. Small investors rallied together to snap up stocks of money-losing companies the hedge funds bet against. They sent shares of troubled businesses such as AMC and GameStop to the moon.”
It’s not terribly difficult to figure out why AMC is a troubled business. The movie theater chain had gone on an ill-timed acquisition spree before the pandemic, racking up roughly $5 billion in debt at the end of 2019 and posting losses of $149 million — after recording a $110 million profit in 2018.
Then the pandemic decimated moviegoing worldwide — while also ushering in a new reality where streaming is king and cinemas became the last place one wanted to be trapped inside for two hours. Even as theaters have reopened and Hollywood has produced occasional blockbusters, overall ticket sales still lag behind pre-pandemic levels: This September’s box office has sunk to the lowest levels in a quarter century.
But don’t tell that to the Apes — they don’t really mount a clean fight.
They’ve weaponized Twitter, taking potshots at everything from Gasparino’s family members to his Popular workout routinesEven going on an attack when the journalist wrote a New York Post column about him that was very personal. prostate cancer diagnosis. They’ve gone after his producer, Eleanor TerrettShe reported an argument with Aron. He criticised her and unleashed the torrent of demeaning Twitter memes bordering on being both sexisted and ageist.
There’s even Change.org petitionRupert Murdoch begs Gasparino to leave Fox “Charles Gasparino has proved time and again that he lacks journalistic integrity and basic human decency. He has repeatedly attacked retail investors for their investment choices and pushed his agenda and false narrative that movie theaters, including AMC, are dead — when they have recently posted near-record attendance. Charles Gasparino does not deserve the platform he has been given and his continual abuse of this platform is repulsive and disgraceful.”
AMC has the opposite of near-record attendance — even Aron said the company’s ticket sales won’t riseto pre-pandemic levels. Only 1,132 people have signed the petition. Gasparino continues to do multiple hits per day at the Fox Business studio on 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan.
That’s not to say the Apes haven’t taken some negligible shots. The Apes went on a warpath that was public. Some career controversies from the pastresurfaced, and continued to pile on. He was in a very public scrap trying to enter a party at Sun Valley’s exclusive media summit.
There are also a number of tweets Gasparino dispatched to defend himself and Fox Business’ reporting — then later deleted. Publicly, about the worst thing Gasparino has leveled against the AMC Apes is that they should get out of their mother’s basement a bit more.
“This whole Ape thing, there are different varieties. Some are grifters and criminals, the YouTube circuit bunch. Some are naive. And some really think things through,” said Marc Cohodes, a former hedge fund manager who’s now an individual investor. “The guys who attack Charlie are the people who shoot the messenger rather than pay attention to the message.”
Cohodes added that Gasparino is someone who doesn’t “mind a tussle, a fight, because at the end of the day he tries to help people out with his reporting. When those guys want to get nasty with him, he’ll go toe to toe.”
So, what’s more powerful these days? What resonates more? An informed journalist with a microphone on America’s leading business news channel that overtook rival CNBC in ratings last month. Or, Twitter trolls with a portfolio to protect and thousands of axes.
What investors didn’t know during the past year is that they were buying a stock where management was going to issue more shares, thereby diluting every share’s value.
Gasparino is not known to have ever been in attack mode with Aron. “very able CEO”Both on air and in print. His beef with the Apes is his. At this point, Charlie has won a battle against the bots and anonymous users who are emboldened by social media’s mass hypnosis of civility and reason.
His last message on Twitter to the Ape army: “Not diluted ha!”
