On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

WATCH: Don’t yet know if IPO market is back to full health

Astronomer, a provider of open-source technologies that was hardly known until this week, said on Friday that it’s launched an investigation after CEO Andy Byron was shown on video at a Coldplay concert in an intimate embrace with the company’s head of human relations.

“The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly,” the company said in a post on X.

“Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability,” the company said.

The post comes a day after videos went viral on social media that showed Byron on a big screen at the concert in Boston. Byron, who is married, had his arms around Kristin Cabot, the company’s chief people officer.

Seconds after showing up on the big screen, the pair ducked and hid their faces.

Byron and Cabot have been put on leave, according to a report Friday from Axios.

Astronomer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In May, Astronomer announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

The company, which is behind the open-source data operations platform Astro, relocated its headquarters last year to New York from Cincinnati, Ohio.

WATCH: Tech’s latest job cuts raise questions about AI

Ether and other crypto related stocks climbed to end the week as the GENIUS Act heads to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law. Bitcoin and its proxies took a breather.

The price of ether was last higher by 3.6% at $3,558.68, according to Coin Metrics, trading at highs not seen since January.

On Thursday, ETFs tracking the price of ether saw daily inflows top those of bitcoin ETFs for the first time ever. The funds logged $602 million in net inflows, led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA). Bitcoin ETFs on the same day saw inflows of $522 million. A day earlier, the ETH funds saw a single-day record inflow of $726.7 million.

Stocks tied to crypto trading gained as well. Coinbase rose 4%, hitting an all-time intraday high surpassing its initial pop on its IPO date in 2021, and pacing for its fifth positive week in a row. Robinhood also added 4%. Ether treasury stock Bitmine Immersion continued its rally, jumping 12% Friday.

Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin slipped 1%. Bitcoin treasury giant Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, fell 4% and Mara Holdings, the mining company and bitcoin proxy, hovered under the flat line.

Ether has advanced 19% this week, bringing its two week gain to about 43.6% — its strongest two-week period since August 2021. Bitcoin is down less than 1% for the week.

“No coin seems to have more [momentum] than Ethereum of late,” Wolfe Research’s Read Harvey said in a note this week. “We began suggesting it was time to start gaining exposure in May, as ETH began to show some life relative to BTC. Fast forward to today, and we’re not just seeing life, but a potential trend reversal.”

Now trading near five-month highs relative to bitcoin, the leadership pendulum in crypto may be shifting, he added.

On Thursday, the House passed a bundle of crypto bills, sending one, the stablecoin legislation known as the GENIUS Act, to President Trump’s desk. It is expected to be sign into law Friday afternoon and become the first ever piece of major crypto legislation in the U.S.

“This is the biggest deal in crypto so far this year, up there with the change in the SEC – it’s the first crypto-focused law in the history of the United States, home to the largest financial market in the world. Just the symbolism alone is worth getting excited about,” said Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter.

Being law rather than an agency ruling “means that future Administrations will not be able to easily overturn its provisions. Should any try, by then stablecoins will be so deeply embedded in the global financial landscape, it would be futile,” she added.

House lawmakers also passed a second, much broader crypto market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, that will now go to the Senate.

On Thursday, BlackRock also filed with the SEC to include staking to its ETHA ether ETF, which also boosted sentiment for crypto’s second largest coin.

—With reporting by CNBC’s Nick Wells and Adrian van Hauwermeiren