Steve Cohen has deactivated his Twitter account as of Friday evening.
This action comes after Cohen engaged in discussions about the recent volatility of stocks like Gamestop, with people blaming him, Point72 (Cohen’s personal investment firm), and other firms of getting brokers like Robinhood to stop trading said stocks.
Cohen categorically denied the claims that he, or any other brokers outside of Robinhood, had influence to do such a thing. He also agreed that what Robinhood did was “not fair,” and he was willing to discuss his thoughts on the stock market situation off the Internet with certain agitators. The agitators — being the agitators they are — did not care to do that and would rather force a discussion in a public forum. Cohen seemingly did not want to do that.
Cohen had been using his Twitter account since its inception to interact with fans. He would ask what changes fans wanted in around Citi Field one week and crack jokes about the team’s offseason moves (or lack thereof) the next. As recent as last week, he was joking about signing Bernie Sanders to the team because he has a good glove, referring to the meme of the senator at Joe Biden’s inauguration.
But things turned a bit sour for Cohen on Twitter this week as his name appeared alongside Melvin Capital, the hedge fund attempting to make money off a struggling company like Gamestop by shorting its stock (betting the price would go down even further).
When the stock went way higher than ever expected in such a short time (thanks to a large squadron of retail investors, among other factors), Cohen’s firm pumped $750 million into Melvin Captial — which is run by Gabriel Plotkin, one of Cohen’s top traders at his other firm, SAC Capital Advisors — to help keep it afloat as it got out of its short position on Gamestop. Point72 received a “non-controlling share” of Melvin Capital in return, the Stamford Advocate said.
As an aside: this article by Alexis Goldstein is an extremely solid breakdown of the entire stock situation, along with Cohen’s involvement with it all.
Now, after the last week or so of volatile trading — and Cohen helping bail out Melvin Capital — the New York Times reported that Cohen’s Point72 has lost “nearly 15 percent” of its capital this year. This stems from the money pumped in to help save Melvin Capital, but also Point72 apparently had “roughly $1 billion under management with Melvin.” So when Melvin tanked, so did some of Point72’s profits.
However, when asked on Twitter by a fan if the losses would affect the Mets’ payroll this year, he essentially said that the success –or lack thereof– of his firm will not affect how the team is run or how high or low the payroll will be.
We’ll see if this deactivation of Cohen’s Twitter account is temporary or if Cohen moved to permanently delete his account after experiencing the nasty side of Twitter, which eventually blossoms on everyone. But hey, it’s probably better now than during a 7-20 June.
Update: On Saturday, Cohen released a statement on his deactivation, saying that he’s taking a break after he and his family received threats.
