Business magnate Elon Musk sent the share price of CD Projekt, Poland’s largest video games producer, soaring on Thursday by tweeting praise of its troubled recent release, Cyberpunk 2077.
The billionaire’s enthusiasm, as well as a wave of short-sellers buying back stock, led CD Projekt’s share price to rise by 19% – or roughly 6 billion zloty (€1.3 billion). That is its largest jump since June 2015, according to Bloomberg.
The long-awaited and much-delayed release of Cyberpunk 2077 in December proved to be a major anticlimax. Some versions of the game were found to be riddled with bugs and technical glitches, forcing CD Projekt to offer refunds and Sony to withdraw it from its stores.
However, on Thursday, Tesla CEO Musk – who this month became the world’s richest man – tweeted that “the esthetics of Cyberpunk are incredible” and praised the game’s “interior design”.
Earlier that day, Musk also tweeted an image of his company’s new car model with the Witcher 3 game, CD Projekt’s best-known previous release, on its screen. He noted that it would be possible to play Cyberpunk 2077 game in Tesla’s Model S Plaid.
CD Projekt issued major fixes to its game last weekend, followed by a smaller batch on Thursday. Musk again tweeted about the game on Friday, saying that “even the hotfixes literally have hotfixes, but… great game”.
The esthetics of Cyberpunk are incredible btw. The interior design is👌.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2021
However, following the initial boost, CD Projekt’s share price began to fall again on Friday – by almost 15% by late afternoon.
The earlier improvement in the company’s stock was also due to major short-sellers closing positions to limit their losses as share prices rose. At the start of the month, short interest had been at a record level of 10%. This week CD Projekt benefited from the wave of amateur traders who bought up heavily shorted stocks of companies including GameStop and AMC.
The company’s stocks recorded their highest trading volume to date, with 2.4 billion zloty worth (€530 million) traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (GPW) that day.
Akcje @CDPROJEKTRED_IR: 2.4 mld zł obrotów dziś na @GPW_WSExchange. Wczoraj 1.9 mld zł. Rekordy wszechczasów.
— Konrad Krasuski (@kkrasuski) January 28, 2021
Last year, CD Projekt, best known for its Witcher games series, overtook Poland’s largest bank PKO BP to become the highest valued company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (GPW).
In October, it dropped to second place following the stock market debut of Allegro, Poland’s e-commerce giant, and it has now fallen to fifth place on the exchange.
Poland has become a leading video games exporter in recent years thanks to its cash cows like CD Projekt. The company’s stocks have risen by 21,000% over the past decade, marking the highest increase of any European company in the Stoxx Europe 600 index.
Main image credit: Elon Musk/Twitter
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
