this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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It was actually a bit of legit class warfare. The institutional investors and billionaires were shorting GME so much that they were overexposed, and when u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit spotted and shared it tons of regular middle-class retail investors all piled in to collectively fuck over the billionaires by pumping the price knowing that the short positions would still have to be filled. Probably some billionaires made money too, but for the most part is was a "regular folk vs Wall Street" affair.
They literally hauled u/DeepFuckingValue up in front of a Congressional Inquiry for pointing out on Reddit that a stock was oversubscribed, which is more than they've done for the many questionable insider stock purchases made by politicians and their families in recent years. Indeed, that's a big part of why the story won't go away, because it very publicly proved that the rules only apply if you're not connected.
That’s the big point there. Idk if it was really the “little guys” who benefited - mostly people who had the money to invest. But it proved how fucking arbitrary and stupid and meaningless the stock market is.
We’re told that rich people earned their money through hard work - the guy I knew who put his money on GME for the lols and made bank earned more money by doing nothing than I made working 60+ hours a week as a teacher.
Someone with $50k spare to play the markets has $50,000 more than someone living paycheck-to-paycheck, and $999,950,000 less than a billionaire. The "little guys" in this story are the ones who don't have "buy a politician" money.
I realize that first $50k is super important to your day-to-day life and conquering that second tier of Maslow's hierarchy and all, but in class war terms if you start drawing the lines at someone with a nicer car than you, that's how we end up with Stalinism, which I don't think anyone wants.