The inflation of eccentricity and using popularity and jokes to increase a stock price

With much energy and enthusiasm, Ahmad Al Ghandour, famed for his popular YouTube show called 'Al Daheeh’ with almost a million subscribers, took to the stage during a talk titled “Finance Is Not Funny”, at the Impact Stage at the 6th edition of the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival.

Al-Ghandour started the talk explaining that the the business world is an ever evolving landscape that doesn’t always revolve around the facts and financial fundamentals like it has traditionally in the past, and to demonstrate his point he asked the audience who the founder of US motor and power company, ‘Tesla’ was, to a resounding reply from attendees, “Elon Musk!”.

He then revealed that the Fortune 500 company known for their electric vehicles was in fact started by inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.

Although he gave respect to the efforts and investment foresight Elon Musk had made for the company, after investing $6.5 million to become the largest shareholder in 2004, he noted that there is a new trend in business and buying of stocks that was anchored on popularity and eccentric behavior to boost its scope in the world.

Expanding on this concept, Al Ghandour mentioned the stock market phenomenon that happened with a video-games franchise in the US called ‘Gamestop’, where a number of established and leading hedge funds had decided to try and make profits by ‘shorting’ the stocks of the struggling games company. All would have gone to plan for the gia unint hedge funds if not for an online community called “Wall Street Bets”, who decided to make it their personal mission to save the struggling franchise.

The online community began promoting Gamestop and the buying of their shares by using memes (visual jokes). These jokes went viral worldwide and through mass buying of stocks it caused the share price to shoot up 1,700 per cent, leading to the value of the company going from $200 million to a massive $23 billion, making it a Fortune 500 company.

Al-Ghandour explained that through popularity and virality, companies can sometimes have no need for traditional business fundamentals and make huge profits on their popularity and through jokes and memes alone. He said that there was some value in being eccentric and comedic and being a disruptor and that the inflation of eccentricity was something to keep an eye on, especially when it came to people like Elon Musk who made another example of this through his recent acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform.

Creative content

In a session held on Saturday entitled “The Importance of Creating Diverse Creative Content”, Abdulla Al Nuaimi, host of the Kursi Al Ithnain Podcast, hosted Nujoom Al-Ghanem, a poet, artist and film director; Nahla Al-Fahad, director and producer; Mohammed Rasheedy, executive director The Post Office; and his colleague Mohammed Hossam, founding partner & executive producer, The Post Office.

Al-Ghanem talked about her career in directing so many films, including documentaries and screen movies, some of them were nominated to several local and international awards.She added that film festivals provide a unique opportunity for introducing films to the audience, who have become more open to diversity and creativity.

Al-Fahd indicated that she is passion-driven as passion is the origin of giving. She stressed that the content creator should have a diverse and creative content that would be a source of interest and inspiration for him and his audience.

Rasheedy and Hossam revealed behind-the-scenes of 'Al Daheeh’, which includes more than 350 episodes, and added that each episode requires two months of hard work from around 30 people. They also stressed the role of content creator’s awareness of the need to balance his passion with respecting his audience while providing diverse and meaningful content to enhance sustainability.

— business@khaleejtimes.com

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