Wall Street Flees Meme Stocks: Trump Media, GameStop Left in the Dust

Institutional investors are cutting bait on retail-darling equities—no lifelines, no nostalgia, just cold hard profit-taking. The ’hold the line’ crowd just got steamrolled by algos.

GameStop’s ’stonks go up’ era? Over. Trump Media’s truth-social hype? Flatlined. Meanwhile, your average hedge fund manager just booked another Caribbean vacation on the back of this pump-and-dump circus.

Market reacts fast, and not in a good way

Wall Street’s reaction? Brutal. TRUMP Media stock dropped more than 20% after its announcement. GameStop fell 17%. Investors clearly weren’t convinced.

Meanwhile, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) just keeps ripping higher. Since late 2022, its stock has jumped 26x. It’s become the blueprint for corporate Bitcoin stacking. But it seems the market isn’t treating copycats the same.

“Maybe the market wanted them to buy more bitcoin,” Saylor said in Las Vegas during Bitcoin 2025. “But these are short-term dynamics. Over the long term, bitcoin on the balance sheet has proven to be extraordinarily popular.”

He shared his views on Trump Media too, calling their MOVE “courageous, aggressive, and intelligent.” He said we’re seeing a real change in how companies approach money itself.

“There’s an explosion of interest right now,” he said. “Everywhere I go at this conference, someone says, I’m working on a bitcoin treasury company in Hong Kong. I’ve got a thing going in Abu Dhabi. There’s one starting in Korea. Another one in the U.K. We’re going to do this in the Middle East.”

He’s convinced Bitcoin has gone global. According to him, ambassadors are now “planting the orange flag everywhere on Earth.”

Trump pushes government into Bitcoin

It’s not just companies jumping in. The US government is now in on it too. In March, President Trump signed an executive order creating a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Federal agencies were told to treat Bitcoin as a long-term store of value.

The kicker? The entire reserve will be funded with Bitcoin seized in criminal and civil cases. White House crypto and AI Czar David Sacks said the move was designed to avoid adding to the budget. The reserve is also locked—it can’t be sold off.

The order includes a full audit of the government’s current crypto stash. It’s reportedly more than 200,000 Bitcoin. That alone WOULD make Uncle Sam one of the largest holders on the planet.

The change in tone from the WHITE House is clear. Under Biden, Bitcoin was mostly treated like a risk. Under Trump, it’s become a sovereign asset.

Vice President JD Vance made history this week too. He became the first US VP to speak directly to the Bitcoin community. He called crypto a shield against inflation, censorship, and unelected bureaucrats.

Even the Department of Labor reversed course. It pulled back old rules that had blocked Bitcoin from retirement accounts.

“No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” Saylor said. “Bitcoin is digital capital and maybe the most explosive idea of the era.”

Big companies still hesitate

Still, many big players aren’t on board. Take Microsoft. Last year, shareholders shot down a proposal to follow Saylor’s lead. “Microsoft can’t afford to miss the next technology wave,” he told them in a video pitch.

He also said the lukewarm reaction to Trump Media and GameStop wasn’t just about Bitcoin. He pointed to the financing. GameStop’s stock soared 50% when it first teased the idea. Volume went up 10x. Then, it raised $1.5 billion through convertible bonds.

Trump Media did the same thing; raised capital through a big bond deal. According to Saylor, these kinds of moves create pressure in the short term but help in the long term. He says they’re just getting started.

“We’ll keep buying bitcoin,” Saylor told CNBC. “We expect the price of bitcoin will keep going up. We think it will get exponentially harder to buy bitcoin, but we will work exponentially more efficiently to buy bitcoin.”

For people worried about big institutions ruining Bitcoin’s decentralization, he says relax.

“The network is very anti-fragile, and there’s a balance of power here,” he said. “The more actors that come into the ecosystem, the more diverse, the more distributed the protocol is, the more incorruptible it becomes, the more robust it becomes. That means the more trustworthy it becomes to larger economic actors who otherwise would be afraid to put all of their economic weight on the network.”

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