Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing video from 2020.
Alexander Sayganov | SOPA images | LightRocket via Getty Images
LONDON – Shares of Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt rose Thursday after Elon Musk expressed his admiration for the game.
Tesla’s CEO tweeted a photo of his company’s new sedan, the Plaid Model S, and suggested he could run Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, and several other video games.
“It can play Cyberpunk,” said Musk. “Cyberpunk’s aesthetic is incredible, by the way.”
That tweet seemed to send CD Projekt’s share price up sharply on Thursday. The stock rose about 12.6% during afternoon trading. It had a rough ride after Cyberpunk’s release as gamers complained of various bugs and poor performance on older consoles.
Sony even pulled the game from the digital PlayStation Store due to the situation, saying it would offer players a full refund. At the time, analysts said it was very rare for a console to drop an AAA game from the list due to quality issues.
This trading week was characterized by wild stock market volatility, fueled not least by a burst of amateur traders inspired by the Reddit board r / WallStreetBets flooding heavily shorted stocks like GameStop and AMC.
Short selling is a strategy where investors borrow shares of a stock to sell them at a specified price with the expectation that the market value will fall below that level when it comes time to pay for the borrowed shares.
It is not clear whether CD Projekt’s price increase on Thursday was the result of a brief push. According to IHS Markit, 9.3% of CD Projekt’s outstanding shares are currently on loan. The stock gained popularity as a negative public reaction to the game soon after.
It wouldn’t be the first time a tweet from Musk has made certain stocks rise higher. A tweet from the billionaire saying “GameStonk” linked to the WallStreetBets subreddit, sending GameStop skyrocketing in Tuesday’s after-hours trading.
And his tweet telling his followers to “use Signal” – in reference to the encrypted messaging app that gained popularity following a response to a privacy update from WhatsApp – led investors to share the stock price of Signal Advance, a small manufacturer. of components.