King of Stonks is a dramedy about a digital start-up that rises out of obscurity which happens to raise a lot of eyebrows within the public. The series is streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Felix Armand is the brains behind the digital payments company, CableCash. They’re about to go public on the stock market and announce their IPO at a big event and Felix is set to be promoted to co-CEO.
His boss and the current CEO is Dr. Magnus Cramer, a typical narcissistic businessman who is a good social presence and has the charm to draw attention away from his other faults.
Felix is looking for a presentation that he prepared for the announcement while Alex, the company lawyer, insists on him paying attention while they interview someone for the position of his assistant.
He’s too focused on finding that presentation that he decides to hire Sascha, the girl who’s arrived from Telekom to help set up their office. He heads home where his sister and nephew have moved in and his sister brings up an article touching upon his company’s ties to a pair of brothers, Fabian and Till Hermann, involved in internet porn.
Felix tries to bring this to the attention of Magnus, but Magnus is more interested in making sure his announcement goes well, which is why he even tells Felix that the presentation he prepared is not required.
The Digital Minister of Germany, Desiree Maletzki, is in attendance during the announcement as CableCash and Deutsche Bank are competing for a government contract.
Magnus does great at the presentation with Felix guiding him through an earpiece. Magnus confirms the government deal in advance, putting Maletzki on the spot. She agrees to it as long as Fabian and Till aren’t anywhere to be seen because she cannot be associated with the.
Felix has to then ask the Hermann brothers to lay low, but they’re not happy with this even though they agree. As Felix is partying for his momentary triumph, a woman introduces herself as Amirah Wallace and says she wants to invest in him.
That’s when Magnus pulls him away and goes to Felix’s house to sign the contract. But Magnus has other plans as screws Felix into accepting a role as COO instead of co-CEO as was previously agreed upon.
The Hermann brothers mess things up for Felix even further after they tip off the police about CableCash’s ties to the Mafia and the Visconti family. Felix puts out that fire too with some quick thinking while Magnus continues being his obnoxious self and digging a deeper hole for the company with each step.
At the Global Economic Forum in Geneva, Magnus makes a fool out of the company by getting drunk and missing his presentation and Felix wants to force him out because he’s too unreliable. Magnus doesn’t budge and continues his delusional behaviour to gain a larger social media following.
Felix tries to get a special audit done on the company’s quarterly reports so that their earnings are legitimised in front of the public. He also orchestrates a special deal involving a company in Asia to inflate their numbers.
Meanwhile, he gets closer to Amirah, who is actually a short seller named Sheila Williams, who is betting against CableCash because she’s certain they’re a sham company and she just needs the proof.
Tom Wieland, the reporter who had written the initial article on CableCash and the Hermann brothers, has a personal vendetta against Magnus and wants to take him down. Felix speaks to him and wants him to consider an approach that targets Magnus without affecting the company that he built from the ground up.
Felix plans on quitting and throwing Magnus to the wolves but when he learns the truth about Sheila and the fact that Magnus planned on selling the company to Deutsche Bank, he has a change of heart and still believes that they can come out on top.
King of Stonks ending explained in detail: (Episode 6: Panic)
Expanding the family
When Deutsche Bank wanted to buy CableCash back when it was still called Networth and wasn’t worth much, Magnus connected with Felix and praised him for writing the digital code of the company. Together, they made it look like the code was lost and screwed the deal with Deutsche Bank so that they could pounce on it later.
He threatens Tom with bodily harm so that he won’t post the article that Felix had provided the information for in the first place.
Finally, he invites the Hermann brothers and Mrs Viscounti to Magnus’s house so that they can sign an agreement making them shareholders and partners in CableCash.
Sheila is still convinced that she can make the short happen and goes for one last-ditch effort to see it go through.
Planting the seeds
Sheila gathers all the information she has on CableCash and visits her assistant’s former professor to secure funding for the short. He agrees to give her 50 million for this venture.
Things are temporarily on the up for CableCash and Felix is in a good mood when he gets an email from Tom about the article he’s written. He informs him that the article will go live the following day at noon and he has 24 hours to respond to all the claims in the article.
He meets with Sheila and accepts his defeat, asking her to join him as he runs away. She rebukes his request and says that their whole relationship was a sham with only one winner. Felix then gets drunk and rambles on about the article to the owner of the restaurant who is a friend and a former short-seller himself.
The restaurant owner takes this information and calls everyone he knows and tells them about it.
Hold to the moon
The next day as the market opens people start shorting the CableCash stock and Sheila gets in on it too after handing over all her evidence to the DA.
She wonders why everyone else has started shorting as well and she calls Tom to find out if he knows anything but he plays dumb. Tom suddenly realizes what’s happening and calls his boss to beg them to stop the article from being published but to no avail.
As soon as the news breaks, the CableCash stocks begin to fall and the short sellers make tons of money. Magnus is approached by his employees who are worried that things are going to be bad but he assures them that everything’s fine.
He finds a letter from Felix and informs the media that he’ll be holding a press conference. Felix video calls Sheila and fulfils a promise he had made on their first date. He films himself singing ‘My Way’ by Frank Sinatra as Sheila begins to doubt that something’s wrong.
During his press conference, Magnus reads out a statement written by Felix. It stated that the article and the simultaneous shorting by investors was a careful ploy by Sheila and Tom as a means of market manipulation.
He manages to sway the public opinion back in their favour and play the victim as all the short sellers become bankrupt with the stock rising once again.
Felix finally stands up to Magnus and gets his preferred agreement. Just then, news breaks that the former head of digital for Deutsche Bank died in a plane crash (which might have been planned by their criminal shareholders) and the person replacing her is their former lawyer, Alex, which means trouble for CableCash once again.
Also Read: ‘Stranger Things’ becomes second Netflix show to cross 1 billion streaming hours