Take-Two Just Gained $2 Billion in Market Value From One Leaked GTA 6 Email

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick may have revealed plans for the company to move beyond the entertainment industry, but he probably forgot that Grand Theft Auto 6 and its influence have transcended way past other competing products in the same medium. After all, how could you not say that after the next Grand Theft Auto just moved billions of dollars in a single morning based on a pre-order rumor (which, for what its worth, might be true)?

The Best Buy email, which surfaced through multiple YouTube creators and social media accounts on May 13, was sent to members of Best Buy's affiliate program. It described a campaign called "GTA 6 Pre Order (Physical Game)" running from May 18 through May 21. According to its content, affiliates would receive a 5% commission on each physical copy pre-order generated through their links.

May 18 is this coming Sunday, and May 21 is the date of Take-Two's Q4/FY2026 earnings call.

Neither Rockstar Games nor Take-Two has confirmed the pre-order date. Best Buy's GTA VI landing page is live but does not currently offer an active purchase option. The stock surged anyway. That's roughly $2 billion in market value, created by a still-unverified email from a retail affiliate program. If this doesn't show the gravitional pull of GTA 6 beyonnd its traditional audience in a nutshell, we don't know what will. What's more is that this isn't the first time this has happened.

Here is the pattern:

Each GTA 6 catalyst produces a larger stock movement than the last. The ShinyHunters leak added $1 billion just a few weeks ago, and the Best Buy email added $2 billion. The actual pre-order launch date, if confirmed for May 18, will definitely make money printers go brrr. Trailer 3, whenever it drops, will do the same, perhaps even producing the largest single-day movement yet, and the November 19 launch will dwarf all of them and then some.

The Best Buy email aligns with everything we have tracked so far. Zelnick said marketing starts "soon" at iicon on April 28, and Rockstar hired a production artist for global campaign materials. A pre-order window of May 18 to May 21, ending on the day of the earnings call, would give Zelnick the most powerful opening statement of his career: "Pre-orders are live, and here is what the first 72 hours look like."

If the email is real and we have reason to believe it is, the sequence would look something like this:

Here's how we think things will play out: Rockstar drops the trailer to generate maximum social media velocity, pre-orders open while the internet is still processing the trailer, and three days of pre-order data accumulate, giving Zelnick more than enough confidence than he already has to walk into the earnings call to let most of the numbers do the talking for him.

If the Best Buy email is real, pre-orders open in four days, which means we'll know how much we'll have to pay for GTA 6 by then, and Trailer 3 is almost certainly coming before or simultaneously with the pre-order launch, because that's just how Rockstar does things. The May 21 earnings call is one week away. The Best Buy window opens in four days. Zelnick has been saying "soon" for two weeks. The stock market just bet and is still betting billions that he meant it.

We will know more for sure by Sunday.