Matt Levine, Columnist

GameStop Hired Some Consultants

Also various Russian financial troubles and ESG reporting expense.

March 23, 2022 at 5:30 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Wouldn’t it be amazing to learn that GameStop Corp.’s whole turnaround plan — the plan that turned it from an $18.84 stock at the end of 2020 to a $325 stock a month later, the plan that made it a darling of retail investors, the plan that got it a bunch of new high-powered executives to execute its move into online retail and also ugh non-fungible tokens — was written by consultants at Boston Consulting Group? Like if somewhere there was a PowerPoint deck from BCG, from 2020, laying out how to become a meme stock? Before “meme stock” was even a thing? Wouldn’t it be great if an internal BCG think tank invented meme stocks, and somehow last year’s wild Reddit enthusiasm for GameStop was all secretly created by consultants? That would be very funny and also maybe the most impressive strategy-consulting success story I’ve ever heard.

But, no, that is not at all what happened. Instead BCG did some other stuff for GameStop that didn’t work: