WallStreetBets, GameStop, and the “Swirl of Distrust” That’s Electrifying the Stock Market
Everyone loves an underdog. But in 2012, when Jaime Rogozinski founded WallStreetBets, the rowdy but resourceful subreddit dedicated to sharing the trials and tribulations of playing the stock market, he created an army of them.
Most Americans learned about the power of that army nearly a decade later, when it led a financial rebellion against Wall Street bigwigs by bulk-buying shares of GameStop. Fueled by a steadfast belief in the company’s promise, the Reddit legion managed to send GameStop soaring, so much so that Robinhood was forced to restrict trading on the stock. In the end, hedge funds like Melvin Capital abandoned their short positions while leaving scores of average joes significantly better off. It was a David and Goliath story that flummoxed the business press, exposed the perils of parking cash in Robinhood, and shed light on the newfound, disruptive potential of the retail investor.
But the full story of WallStreetBets, as Nathaniel Popper writes in his new book, The Trolls of Wall Street, began long before all that. Popper, a former New York Times journalist who covers the intersection of finance and technology, argues that the movement found its roots in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—a time, he writes, of “distrust and cynicism,” in which lonely, laddish young men were able to find solace together in online trading.
In speaking with Rogozinski as well as countless moderators of WallStreetBets, Popper traces the community back to its salad days, when members would take out risky options contracts and perversely delight at the sight of their bank balance dwindling. Things took a turn in 2013, when Robinhood—in many ways, dangerously—set out to democratize the playing field for retail investors, leading to the subreddit’s transformation into a full-fledged market-mover. As the site grew in tandem with the rise of divisive figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, managing its internal fracas proved a perpetual challenge—particularly when it came to hate speech and crypto. But the site held together. And by February 2020, when COVID crashed the stock market—which many WallStreetBetters leveraged into a windfall—it was becoming clear that this young crowd of upstart investors was far more sophisticated than their forebears. “The new world of online money,” writes Popper, had “given rise to a bunch of self-described trolls and degenerates with an unprecedented knowledge of the levers that make the economy work.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Popper talks about the “complicated factors” behind WallStreetBets’ rise to prominence, why the internet’s “law of attention” has insulated Robinhood from bad publicity, and how the legacy of the GameStop saga continues to animate the hottest trends in institutional trading. “The way the general public thinks about [a] company is now very important to the financial success of that company,” he says. “There’s this whole new element in the financial world now that Wall Street didn’t see coming.”
Vanity Fair: What inspired you to write the book, and what informed your reporting process? I feel like with any subreddit, there’s just this endless wealth of online material to sift through. So how did you decide who to talk to and what to pick out?
Nathaniel Popper: This started as a book about GameStop. And, as I dove into it, I realized that Gamestop was too narrow a lens to look at this through—that there was this much bigger story here that I and most people had missed. And it was this story of generational change in the way that young people related to the markets and stocks and the financial world. What I realized is that there’s this movement that young people had become part of youthful pop culture in a way that most people who were above the age of 35 weren’t really aware of. Because you have this social media record—all of this documentation—you could tell the story of the growth of this community and this new, strange online world in real time. It was like somebody was there filming the whole thing as it happened. As I looked around, I felt like there are not very many people who have taken advantage of the opportunity that social media offers to tell histories of these movements. It’s a really candid window into this whole world.
