Stonks is an intentional misspelling of “stocks” and the caption of a surreal meme in which Meme Man, a bald 3D-rendered head, stands in front of a rising stock chart. People use it to mock or celebrate a questionable money move, and since the 2021 GameStop squeeze it has been everyday slang among meme-stock investors.
Origin
- 2014: the character. Meme Man began as the mascot of the Facebook page Special Meme Fresh. Know Your Meme dates the earliest known version to August 9, 2014, and describes him as “a grey 3D rendering of a human head”. According to a post by the page on the Know Your Meme forums, the model came from a rough attempt at a human head posted on 4chan’s 3DCG board.
- June 5, 2017: the Stonks image. Special Meme Fresh posted Meme Man in front of a stock photo representing the stock market, captioned “STONKS” (Know Your Meme). Wikipedia describes the underlying photo as a man in a business suit with arms crossed and a chart pointing upwards behind him.
- July 3, 2017: Reddit. The image was posted to /r/Ooer, where it gained over 400 points (Know Your Meme).
- 2018–2019: reaction image. A YouTube clip of the word read with heavy reverb (February 9, 2018), an “I’ll Take Your Entire Stock” edit on /r/memes (December 5, 2018) and a fake-text meme on /r/GoodFakeTexts (June 3, 2019) kept it circulating, per Know Your Meme. Slate notes that Elon Musk gave the term a boost with a “Stonk tip of the day” tweet on June 20, 2019.
How It’s Used
The joke is the gap between the confident chart and the shaky reasoning behind it: a bad financial decision is presented as a win. Slate called the word “a funnier way to say the word stocks” that caught on with people who spend a lot of time online, and noted that interest also surged in March 2020, when the coronavirus crash hit the market.
In January 2021 it moved into finance coverage. Slate reported that #stonks had become “the hashtag of choice” for people following the GameStop short squeeze, the rally triggered primarily by users of r/wallstreetbets. Wikipedia records that on January 26, 2021, Elon Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!”, a reference to the stonks meme, along with a link to the subreddit. Wikipedia’s Meme Man article adds that during the squeeze r/wallstreetbets users made Meme Man the face of the meme, and Know Your Meme notes that since then similar meme stocks have themselves been called “stonks”.
The Meme Man Misspelling Family
Stonks spawned a set of look-alike Meme Man memes in 2019 that misspell other professions (Know Your Meme):
| Term | Misspelling of | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Stonks | stocks | Investing, money moves, meme stocks |
| Shef | chef | Cooking jokes |
| Tehc | tech | Technology jokes |
| Helth | health | Health and medicine jokes |
| Gamestonk | GameStop + stonks | Musk’s January 26, 2021 tweet during the squeeze |
The formula is the same in each: a deliberately clumsy spelling paired with Meme Man’s blank 3D face. Wikipedia calls the character one of the only consistent stylistic elements of the surreal memes aesthetic.