The past few weeks have seen an enormous financial conflict take place around the shares of GameStop. Many have lost money, and many more have profited, with the notable exception of GameStop itself.
For the uninitiated, GameStop’s stock became the target of several hedge funds that “shorted” the stock, devaluing it through borrowing and selling for profit. A subreddit called r/wallstreetbets noticed this and decided to purchase GameStop stock to drive up its value. This put a hole in the short-sellers’ plans and, coincidentally, made the WallStreetBets investors a lot of money. However, it seems that at least one of them has legal trouble coming his way.
Known by a few screen names, the man in question is Keith Gill, and he is being sued over his role in the GameStop stock explosion. The lawsuit centers around the fact that Gill’s advice to purchase GameStop stock was very disruptive, costing many people – in reality, hedge funds – a lot of money. Now that GameStop’s stock has plummeted due to restrictions, it’s likely regular investors have also lost a lot of cash.
Another major point of the lawsuit is that Gill’s relationship with the stock market is not exactly what he claimed. R/wallstreetbets was meant to be a place where amateur investors would come together to, as the name suggests, bet on stocks. Gill, however, is a licensed broker who, up until recently, worked at the financial company MassMutual. As such, advice from him to invest in GameStop came from a much more informed place than any who read that advice initially believed. Apparently this is a bad thing, although it has little to nothing to do with the chaos that r/wallstreetbets has devolved into as the fiasco has progressed.
On the one hand, this definitely throws Gill’s motivation into question. Apparently, Gill’s investment in GameStop was done back in 2019, long before the whole saga even got started, so his personal interest may have driven his actions on r/wallstreetbets. Further, manipulating stocks is illegal, so the Justice Department is investigating to find out if these events constitute that illegal manipulation. Gill may be in trouble on that front as well.
On the other hand, it hardly seems right to sue Gill for pulling shenanigans with stocks when it was done in direct response to shenanigans pulled by other experienced Wall Street investors. The whole situation has left a bitter taste in people’s mouths at the actions taken to prevent ordinary people from making money off of GameStop’s stocks, and Gill’s lawsuit may just be another of those actions. It’s possible at this point that Gill will be one of the main characters of the upcoming movie about the GameStop stock fiasco, but whether he’s painted as antagonist or protagonist, only time will tell.
Source: GameSpot
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