The internet is seeing the funny side of the stock market meltdown

When things get rough, you can always count on the internet for a laugh.

Wall Street’s AI-fueled rally came to a screeching halt on Thursday, with technology stocks leading a broad sell-off. But as prices fell, the mood on social media was one of gallows humor.

Financial commentators, investors, and meme accounts turned the sell-off into a running joke, offering tongue-in-cheek reminders that the most important thing in a panic is, naturally, to panic.

The losses gave them plenty of material. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% and entered correction territory, while the S&P 500 dropped 4.4% and the Dow shed more than 1,800 points. Nvidia fell 9.3%, AMD sank 17.3%, and the semiconductor index tumbled more than 12%.

Concerns that regulation and local resistance could slow data-center construction weighed on AI stocks. Higher energy prices and uncertainty around interest rates added to investors’ unease.

Financial blog Zero Hedge tried to put the scale of the wipeout into terms its audience would appreciate: “almost 3 Elons.”

It was comparing the roughly $2.9 trillion erased from S&P 500 companies’ market value on Thursday with Musk’s fortune, which the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put at about $785 billion after the close.

By Thursday’s close, the math put the wipeout closer to 3.7 Elons.

Elon Musk himself joined in with a grimacing emoji. He was responding to a post that treated a reported reassurance from Jim Cramer about the AI sell-off as a decidedly worrying sign.

The jokes then moved from the market’s losses to investors’ own.

Tech investor and entrepreneur Chris Bakke, who has 1.7 million followers on X, found a silver lining for anyone worried about their tax bill this year.

One user offered the sort of advice that tends to sound terrible on a trading floor and perfectly reasonable in a meme.

Some kicked the melodrama up a notch, with Gemini, a trading platform, posting a video seemingly comparing the stock wipeout to before and after the detonation of the atom bomb.

Others imagined the Nasdaq as a disaster zone.

For another user, the trouble meant one thing at home: Christmas was off.

Financial advisor Douglas Boneparth closed out the coping strategies with a different take on diversification: five varieties of alcohol to help him forget his portfolio.

Even longevity bro Bryan Johnson got in on the act, reimagining the sea of red in the market as a dose of red-light therapy.

For investors watching their portfolios shrink, making light of the situation was the day’s safest trade: laugh now, cry later.