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- Jim Chanos accused meme-stock traders of being greedy, childish, and entitled.
- The short-seller said they were chasing profits, not punishing Wall Street's avarice.
- Chanos' recent shorts include Elon Musk's Tesla, Warren Buffett-backed DaVita, and Beyond Meat.
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Jim Chanos blasted meme-stock traders as immature and petulant in a tweet this week. The veteran short-seller also accused them of only caring about money, dismissing their grand claims of taking on Wall Street and democratizing finance as false narratives.
"$GME is up 780% and $AMC is up 1,470% this year. $AMC has tripled in the past three months," the Kynikos Associates boss tweeted from his WallStCynic account, using the stock tickers for GameStop and AMC Entertainment – two of the most popular meme stocks.
"This is not outrage, it is greed," Chanos continued. "The newest generation of entitled retail 'investors' must win all the time, or they cry and blame 'them,'" he added, referring to the hedge funds and shadowy institutions that some meme-stock buyers accuse of rigging markets.
The Kynikos boss tweeted in response to another user suggesting the GameStop and AMC short squeezes had exposed Wall Street crooks' manipulation of stock prices. Chanos has repeatedly mocked meme-stock buyers for their ignorance in recent months, and warned the scale and extent of market speculation today is far worse than during the dot-com bubble.
Chanos is best known for calling out Enron's massive accounting fraud and shorting its stock before the energy giant collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001. His more recent shorts include Beyond Meat, Elon Musk's Tesla, and DaVita – a kidney-dialysis specialist that counts Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway as its largest shareholder.
The short-seller is one of several high-profile investors to sound the alarm on the day-trading boom. Buffett, Michael Burry, Mark Cuban, and several others have cautioned amateur stock-pickers and options traders not to get carried away.