The Money Game: Jen Wieczner

Beware the Meme-Stock King Ryan Cohen is making wild profits. But at whose expense?

RIGHT BEFORE LABOR DAY weekend, Gustavo Arnal, the chief financial officer of Bed Bath & Beyond, jumped to his death from the "Jenga Building," Tribeca's tallest skyscraper. Arnal reportedly did not leave a note, but his plunge came a day after he closed a $500 million deal to shore up the ailing retailer. Bed Bath & Beyond, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, had announced just days before that it would cut 20 percent of its staff and close 150 stores. There was one other wrinkle to the mystery of Arnal's death: a perfectly timed $1.4 million stock sale at the peak of a surge in Bed Bath & Beyond's stock in August, a frenzy initiated by a 37-year-old Florida man named Ryan Cohen-which had instigated a class-action lawsuit alleging that Arnal and Cohen had conspired to pump and dump shares of the company.

They made an odd couple. Arnal was a Fortune 500 veteran who had spent most of his career at the multinational Procter & Gamble; colleagues reportedly remembered him as a straitlaced professional and workaholic. Cohen, by contrast, has emerged in recent years as Wall Street’s meme-stock king, posting and trolling his way—one poop emoji at a time—to becoming the Reddit version of a populist hero. It’s not clear what relationship Arnal and Cohen had, if any (there is reportedly no record of private communications between them), but it was hard to dismiss as mere coincidence the fact that both men had profited from Cohen’s stockfluencer brand of yolo investing.

The tragic consequences of Bed Bath & Beyond’s whiplashing fortunes have cast an even darker cloud over Cohen’s reputation. But in all likelihood the meme-stock phenomenon is here to stay—even if Cohen and his ilk are profiting off the backs of the “apes” who support them.