SamuZai
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The Meme Stock Cult

In 2021, scrappy young investors from across the world joined forces to buy GameStop stock, aiming to take down greedy hedge funds. What came next was tragedy, injustice, and a conspiratorial internet cult so stupid we had to do an episode about it.

As always, you can play this episode directly through Patreon or use our RSS feed to add it to your podcast app. Here are the instructions from Patreon.

If you have suggestions for bonus episode content, let us know in the comments!

Later this week: Nudge, pt. 2: The Nudgening


Comments

Would love a part II to this considering recent events.

Emily Adamo

They were right that the game is rigged, but it's rigged in the way it's been rigged forever, not due to an exotic and elaborate conspiracy. Also, pointing out how similar this was to a doomsday cult is brilliant.

Chad Romney

I’m so happy and grateful that Dorian from origin story name checked this podcast on the 1984 podcast a while back. I’ve listened to all these at least twice. Fave podcast by a mile

david lister

I guess the one good thing that came out of this is random cult members being nice to gamestop employees to boost morale. πŸ˜… 'cause it sure feels like the average person feels justified in punishing service industry workers because they have bad jobs and must therefore be bad people πŸ˜“

Violence Zack

How could you not mention the fantastic music that this stock cult has inspired? https://youtu.be/vh6aZYKspKA?si=arg6qRHqKMHR0Fpm

Kevin Hengehold

Double featuring this and folding ideas β€œthis is financial advice”

. Z f

Just read this article, thought y'all might enjoy https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-31/the-moon-emoji-is-securities-fraud "in the world of meme stocks, there are no reasonable investors. What matters is not cash flows or business plans but memes and influencers, and so the standards for fraud are … perhaps different? In the world of meme stocks, if you are a meme-stock influencer, and you tweet a moon emoji when you are in fact feeling pensive-face-emoji, then arguably you are lying, and arguably your misleading emoji is material to your meme-stock fans. They are not reasonable, necessarily, but they are the investors you’ve got, and if the stock doubles due to your emoji then I guess it was material."


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