Elon Musk has just turbo-boosted shares in Poland’s largest computer game maker by raving about CD Projekt SA’s Cyberpunk game on his Twitter account.
Shares of the company were up a whopping 19%, the highest number since June 2015 and with trading volume nearly six times the three-month average, after the CEO of Tesla Inc. tweeted Thursday that “Cyberpunk’s aesthetic is incredible.” Hours earlier, the billionaire had tweeted that it would be possible to play the complex and futuristic game on Tesla’s new Model S Plaid.
CD Projekt shares are up this week, along with some of Europe’s most short stocks in an echo of a similar rally in the US, where retail investors battled short sellers by piling on names like GameStop Corp. than 40% in four days.
Glitches in the company’s highly anticipated Cyberpunk game, which launched in December, were for Sony Corp. reason to drop the title from PlayStation Store, an unprecedented step for the industry. But brief interest in the shares has started to fall back from the record high of 10% at the beginning of the month. Melvin Capital Management LP was one of the funds with a short position in the shares of CD Projekt.
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Musk first showed interest in CD Projekt’s largest production ever in 2019. Shortly after the game was revealed last month, tweeted that he played it briefly and that it “seemed pretty good.”
And the Polish game maker isn’t the only stock to benefit from Musk’s tweets this week. On Tuesday, the shares of Etsy Inc. as Musk praised the company after purchasing a gift for his dog on the ecommerce platform.
CD Projekt’s share, which plummeted after Cyberpunk’s troubled debut, ended the session up 16%. The studio released a major patch last weekend to address bugs in the game, followed by a smaller fix on Thursday.
(Updates stocks, adds trading volume, reference to Melvin Capital in 4th paragraph.)