Futurology

Yeah. The price boost is from the same day traders looking forward to shorting the stock later.

It baffles me that boards of directors (who ought to have high exposure to the long term stock price) allow this behavior.

I suspect it's because they intend to manipulate the stock price later with a buy-out and because they want to indebt the company to their preferred malicious lender (which they have even more stock in).