Ryan Cohen: The Meme King Who Built an Empire One Tweet at a Time

1. The Turning Point: Cohen's GameStop Investment

The email arrived on a Tuesday morning in September 2020. Ryan Cohen's investment firm, RC Ventures, had just filed a 13D with the Securities and Exchange Commission, disclosing a near 10% stake in GameStop. For most investors, GameStop represented everything wrong with brick-and-mortar retail—a dying company in a digital world, hemorrhaging customers to online downloads and streaming services.

But Cohen saw something different. This wasn't just about video games. This was about an army of retail investors who felt betrayed by Wall Street, dismissed by the financial media, and hungry for a champion. Within months, his investment would trigger the greatest retail investor uprising in market history, transforming GameStop from a $4 stock into a cultural phenomenon that peaked at $483 per share.

Cohen has been dubbed the "Meme King" for his influence on meme stocks, but that title barely captures the complexity of his strategy. He didn't just buy a struggling retailer—he activated a movement. And in doing so, he redefined what it means to be an activist investor in the social media age.

2. Early Life & Entrepreneurial Roots

Ryan Cohen was born in 1986 to a Jewish family in Montreal. He never attended college, citing his father, who ran a glassware company, as his primary inspiration in pursuing an entrepreneurial route. His father, Ted Cohen, was an entrepreneur who owned a glassware importing business and served as Ryan's primary inspiration for pursuing entrepreneurship.

The Cohen household wasn't wealthy, but it was entrepreneurial to its core. Ted Cohen had built his importing business through sheer determination, and he instilled in his son the importance of delayed gratification and relentless work ethic. His father died in December 2019. Before his death, Ted would become the subject of a series of children's books titled Teddy that Cohen published in 2022, writing "My father, Ted Cohen, and his lessons have guided me throughout my life. He showed me an exceptional work ethic and an unwavering commitment to delayed gratification."

At the age of 15, Cohen started his first business collecting fees off referrals to various e-commerce sites. He began building websites for money, with his first client being his father's glassware importing business. This wasn't teenage rebellion—this was preparation.

While his peers worried about college applications, Cohen was already thinking like a businessman. He met his future Chewy co-founder in an online chat room discussing website design and computer programming. The foundation for his empire was being laid one website, one connection, one lesson at a time.

3. Building Chewy: From Startup to Powerhouse

In 2011, at the age of 25, Cohen founded Chewy under its original name of MrChewy. Cohen says his inspiration for picking the pet category came from his experience shopping for his poodle Tylee. He was standing in a local pet store with his toy poodle, Tylee, discussing her food with the proprietor, when he realized that millions of other pet owners were equally concerned about their animals' well-being.

The pet supply market seemed perfect—large, fragmented, and dominated by players who treated customers like transaction numbers rather than pet parents. But Cohen's vision went deeper than competitive analysis. To grow Chewy, Cohen used Amazon's guidelines for supply chain, logistics and the convenience of shopping online but added a focus on customer service, including hand-written holiday cards, pet portraits, and flowers for deceased pets.

The early years were brutal. Cohen says he originally approached over 100 venture capital firms and was rejected by all of them. They bootstrapped Chewy and it took a couple years before they were able to raise capital. Working from Florida—far from Silicon Valley's venture capital ecosystem—Cohen and his team faced skepticism at every turn.

Over 75% of venture capital goes to three states: California, New York, and Massachusetts. They were also doing everything with no credentials. Cohen never went to college, had no background in retail, and didn't have a network or a rich uncle he could ask for a loan.

But Cohen's customer obsession was starting to pay dividends. In 2013, Cohen secured the company's first outside investment from Volition Capital for $15 million. Cohen describes that first round of funding as a major watershed, writing "From that point on, the mission was larger. I was even more committed to making Chewy an industry leader because it was no longer just our own money on the line."

4. Chewy's Defining Decision: Vertical Integration

By 2016, he had raised capital from investors including BlackRock and T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund. That year the company had $900 million in sales and had become the number 1 online pet retailer. But Cohen faced a make-or-break decision that would define his approach to business forever.

The entire team had to make a critical choice about bringing warehousing and fulfillment in-house, which meant hiring more people and finding more financing. "For me, the riskier decision would have been to stay the course and keep the status quo. It was a do-or-die moment for the company."

Cohen chose the path of maximum difficulty. They opened their first warehouse in early 2014 in Pennsylvania. "It was harder and more expensive than we anticipated. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Consultants told us it would take 18 months. We did it less than six. We built a team who worked like Navy Seals around the clock."

The warehouse decision transformed Chewy from another e-commerce site into a vertically integrated powerhouse. Later that year, they opened a second warehouse in Nevada. "This time it was like riding a bicycle. We now had the recipe and an amazing team to execute on our plan."

By 2017, he raised $350 million and was preparing for an IPO. In April 2017, PetSmart purchased Chewy for $3.35 billion in the largest e-commerce acquisition of all time. Cohen was 31 years old and had built something unprecedented—an e-commerce company that competed directly with Amazon and won.

5. New Challenges: Stepping Away and Reassessing

Success brought new challenges. Cohen remained CEO following the acquisition and operated the business largely as an independent unit of PetSmart. He grew the business to 3.5 billion in revenue in 2018, including 66% of sales coming from customers signed up for automatic recurring shipments, prior to stepping down as CEO to pursue personal goals and spend time with his family.

But stepping away from operational leadership proved more difficult than building the company. Cohen had poured everything into Chewy—his vision, his work ethic, his father's lessons about delayed gratification. In June 2019, Chewy went public at a valuation of $8.7 billion. Cohen watched from the sidelines as his creation achieved the public market success he had always envisioned.

The period between 2018 and 2020 represents the most mysterious chapter in Cohen's career. He made strategic investments, including a significant investment in Apple, making him the largest individual shareholder of the tech company with 1.55 million shares (6.2 million split-adjusted shares as of August 31, 2020), but he remained largely out of the public eye.

His father died in December 2019, removing the mentor who had guided every major decision of his career. For the first time, Cohen was entirely on his own, with the capital and credibility to pursue any opportunity but without the clear mission that had driven the Chewy years.

6. Transforming GameStop: The Meme Stock Revolution

In September 2020, Cohen disclosed a near 10% stake in GameStop, making him the company's biggest individual investor. This was later increased to 12.9% on December 17, 2020, through an amended 13D filing with SEC.

The investment seemed inexplicable to traditional analysts. GameStop was everything Chewy had disrupted—a brick-and-mortar retailer being destroyed by digital transformation. But Cohen saw parallels that others missed. Just as pet owners had been underserved by traditional retail, gamers were being underserved by a company that had forgotten its core constituency.

According to these filings, Cohen's firm, RC Ventures, has expressed willingness to get more involved with the company in order "to produce the best results for all shareholders." In January 2021, Cohen joined the GameStop board along with two Chewy executives. Cohen was appointed chairman of the board on June 9th 2021 to lead a new committee in charge of a company-wide transformation.

What happened next transcended traditional business metrics. GameStop shares soared 1,625% in January 2021, including a 400% gain in one week. Traders on Reddit teamed up to push the stock higher and squeeze the short sellers, who were betting on a drop in the stock.

Cohen was one of the few billionaire investors who understood how Reddit forums worked even before the meme stock boom of January 2021. He saw in GME an investment opportunity that combined potential for future financial performance with the stock's popularity among individual investors.

On September 28, 2023, Cohen took over as Chief Executive Officer of GameStop, working without compensation. GameStop said in a statement that Cohen won't receive compensation for serving as its president, CEO and chairman.

7. Navigating Setbacks and Controversy at GameStop

The meme stock euphoria couldn't mask fundamental business challenges. The stock has fallen from $82 to $22.93 or 72% since he was elected chairman as of August 12, 2025. Cohen has been instrumental in a number of changes at GameStop, including the hiring of over 200 employees, 85% of which have since left the company.

Ryan Cohen is responsible for the GME NFT marketplace which was a failure and has since shut down. The digital transformation that worked so seamlessly at Chewy proved more elusive in the gaming space, where customer behavior and competitive dynamics operated differently than in pet supplies.

Cohen also faced regulatory scrutiny beyond GameStop. In September 2024, the FTC announced that Ryan Cohen, managing partner of RC Ventures, LLC, and Chairman and CEO of GameStop Corp., will pay a $985,320 civil penalty to settle charges that his acquisition of Wells Fargo & Company shares violated the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

In March 2022, it was disclosed that Cohen had a near 10% stake in Bed Bath & Beyond, through his investment company RC Ventures LLC. Between August 15 and 18, his firm sold all of the stock, totaling 9.45 million shares. The profit was estimated at $68 million. Cohen was named in a federal lawsuit on August 24, 2022 for an alleged fraudulent scheme to artificially inflate the price of Bed Bath & Beyond's publicly traded stock in a pump and dump. The case was dismissed on June 11, 2024.

8. Legacy, Influence, and Social Media Activism

In Reddit communities such as R/Superstonk or R/BBBY, Chewy co-founder and GameStop Chairman Ryan Cohen is often hailed as a hero, memorialized in face-swap memes or placed at the center of "tinfoil hat" theories. "He is the god figure of the meme-stock community," said Evan, a Reddit user.

Cohen's influence extends far beyond GameStop's stock price. He demonstrated that social media could be weaponized for shareholder activism in ways that traditional institutional investors never imagined. His tweets, sometimes appearing to take the form of riddles, often attract the attention of Redditors, who seek to decode his messages.

When Cohen tweets, discussions ensue on Reddit, with users coming up with theories on when price movements will occur within their preferred stock holdings. This represents a fundamental shift in how markets process information—from institutional research reports to cryptic social media posts analyzed by millions of retail investors.

Cohen has acquired a large stake in Alibaba worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In August 2023, he began communicating with the company's board, encouraging them to increase their share-repurchase program, which they did later that year, extending it to March 2025 and raising the amount from $25 billion to $40 billion.

As of 2025, Cohen's net worth stands at $4.76 billion, ranking him #807 globally among billionaires. But his true legacy may be democratizing activist investing, proving that influence in modern markets comes not from institutional capital alone, but from understanding and mobilizing retail investor sentiment.

9. Lessons from Ryan Cohen's Playbook

1. Customer Obsession Over Competition Analysis Cohen didn't beat Amazon by studying Amazon—he beat Amazon by obsessing over pet owners. The secret was building "a team that was obsessed with delighting our customers," including handwritten thank-you notes and flowers for deceased pets. Focus on what customers truly need, not what competitors are doing.

2. Embrace Maximum Difficulty for Maximum Reward When Chewy faced the warehousing decision, Cohen chose the hardest path: vertical integration. "For me, the riskier decision would have been to stay the course and keep the status quo." The highest returns come from solving the problems others consider unsolvable.

3. Understand Your Constituency Before Your Industry Cohen understood how Reddit forums worked even before the meme stock boom of January 2021. He recognized that GameStop wasn't just a retail play—it was a cultural phenomenon. Study the people who care about your investment, not just the financial metrics.

4. Align Incentives Through Personal Risk Cohen has consistently emphasized the importance of personal accountability among GameStop executives and their vested interest in the company's future success. He won't receive compensation for serving as president, CEO and chairman. Put your own capital at risk to prove conviction.

5. Communication Is Strategy Cohen rarely gives interviews with major media outlets, and instead expresses himself mainly through his Twitter account, often via memes and cryptic messages. In the social media age, how you communicate matters as much as what you communicate. Build influence through authenticity, not traditional PR.

10. Your Path Forward: Applying Cohen's Principles

Ryan Cohen's story proves that the greatest opportunities often hide in plain sight, dismissed by conventional wisdom. He saw potential in pet supplies when everyone chased tech startups. He saw community in GameStop when everyone saw decline.

The Cohen playbook isn't about following his specific moves—it's about developing the vision to see what others miss and the conviction to act when everyone else hesitates. Whether you're building a company or choosing investments, ask yourself: Are you studying the metrics, or are you understanding the people behind them?

In a world where algorithms increasingly drive market decisions, Cohen's greatest insight may be the most human one: that sustainable value comes from genuinely serving constituencies that others have forgotten or dismissed. The meme king's empire wasn't built on memes—it was built on caring more deeply about customers and shareholders than anyone thought possible.