Stonks is a way to make a show of ignorance about the stock market or take pleasure when the stock market plunges. Ha! 7% drop in stonks, #bitcoin calls that a Thursday. Stonks is also sometimes a generic, humorous way to refer to stocks, especially when they have dropped. The following quoted tweet roughly translates to, from Portuguese: “Conference on the coronavirus canceled due to the coronavirus.” Stonks is sometimes used in an extended way to comment on all sorts of non-financial situations seen as a self-own or ironic in some way. Stonks memes are often used to make (often hypothetical) jokes about situations where a person thinks they are cleverly making a profit but aren’t or can’t. This hit its apex when billionaire Elon Musk, who had been a fan of the stonks meme for years, apparently supported /r/WallStreetBets by tweeting “Gamestonk!!” and linking to the subreddit. This “war” escalated quickly and social media users began using stonks and other memes that were popular among /r/WallStreetBets to show solidarity. The stonks meme was popular with the subreddit and would often be mentioned alongside posts about GameStop stock. A stock market subreddit /r/WallStreetBets encouraged users to invest heavily in GameStop stock in response to the stock being a major target of short sellers. In late January 2021, stonks caught the attention of mainstream media due to its use during a “stock market war” over the stock of the video game retailer GameStop.

Many people on Twitter commented on the financial news with stonks and stonks meme. For instance, the US stock market saw significant declines in early March during the coronavirus outbreak. By 2019, stonks was being increasingly used outside the context of the original meme to talk and joke about stocks online in various ways. The stonks meme spread in 2018–19, especially on Reddit. You gotta do what you gotta do $$$ from dankmemes In the case of stonks, the success of the misspelling may also be due to the fact that stonks sound amusing to many people. Thicc and smol are some other recent examples. These misspellings are often done to be humorous, playful, and ironic, among other reasons. Deliberate misspellings-such as rendering stocks as stonks-are popular in internet culture.

(See our entry at dank memes.) The figure in the stonks meme is known as the Meme Man, a kind of recurring, stock character (like Wojak) in meme culture. In internet culture, the stonks meme is considered a so-called surreal meme, which is meant to be strange and absurd.

The man is standing before a blue, electronic stock quotation board. The man’s head has been substituted with a plain, intentionally unusual-looking computer-generated head.

The meme features the word stonks, in white, below an orange, upward-pointing arrow (indicating stock prices are increasing) next to a generic man in a business suit. The internet slang stonks is not related to the military verb and noun stonk, “to bombard with artillery” and “a concentrated bombardment by artillery,” respectively. Stonks is credited to a meme that emerged on a Facebook group, called Special meme fresh, in 2017.

Stonks meme generator