Even though conservatives and liberals alike have sided with WallStreetBets and their push to surge GameStop (GME) stock to squeeze hedge funds on Wall Street, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel dusted up a familiar conspiracy theory: Russia, Russia, Russia.
In the opening monologue for his show last Friday, Kimmel referred to the Reddit army as “a bunch of amateur investors” who may or may not be Putin’s troll minions.
“Have you been following this story about GameStop and the stock market. GameStop, if you don’t know, is a video game store, and like a lot of businesses, they’ve been struggling because of COVID but also because most people buy games online now,” he said.
“And yet, despite a sharp decline in sales, over the past six months their stock price has grown by 8000% because a bunch of amateur investors, maybe even some Russian disruptors, who are part of a Reddit community called WallStreetBets decided to buy a bunch of GameStop stock and drive the price up and screw over the hedge fund guys who had shorted the stock,” he continued.
Kimmel was equally harsh in his mockery of the hedge fund fat cats.
“Now the hedge fund guys are upset and they’re pushing for an investigation and they’re like ‘we can’t have a bunch of randos from Reddit manipulating the market. That’s what we do. They are stealing our thing,'” he said. “It’s very confusing, but I think that I came up with a good analogy. It’s basically like one of those high school movies, where all the popular football players bet that the weird girl at school will never become prom queen. And then the nerds find out, and they use their computers to make weird girl prom queen. And then the jocks have to pay up. And then the girl uses her psychic powers to kill everyone except Freddie Prinze Jr.”
Also on Friday, Jimmy Kimmel deleted a response to fellow comedian Jon Stewart when he posted in support of WallStreetBets.
“This is bulls**t. The Redditors aren’t cheating, they’re joining a party Wall Street insiders have been enjoying for years. Don’t shut them down…maybe sue them for copyright infringement instead!! We’ve learned nothing from 2008,” tweeted Stewart.
“RealDonaldTrump? Is this you?” responded Kimmel in his now-deleted tweet.
Since the GameStop stock surged to unprecedented levels last week, causing a short squeeze and costing hedge funds more than $1 billion in losses, the debate has largely centered around market volatility and whether the Redditers were engaged in a “pump and dump.” No evidence reportedly exists yet indicating that WallStreetBets and those who spearheaded the squeeze were participating in a “pump-and-dump,” which would be deliberately lying about a stock’s positive value and selling it to unsuspecting investors.