This was the week that the stock market became the stonks market. For those of you unaware,“stonks” is an internet meme, an absurdist play on the word “stock” that’s now almost unavoidable on social media. On Jan. 26, Elon Musk, recently the world’s richest man,tweeted “Gamestonk!!”, and received more than 200,000 likes. It included a link to the WallStreetBets forum on the internet message-board platform, Reddit.

WallStreetBets has become the communications hub for a phalanx of bored-at-home, stick-it-to-the-man retail traders who have cast themselves as the heroes in a David-versus-Goliath battle against hedge funds, big banks and other avatars of America’s elite. These include the“blue checks”onTwitter,talking headson CNBC,even Robinhood, the trading platformon which many of them had been buying options, until ithalted some of those trades Thursday morning. (The financial machinations of this battle have been…