The creator of the Reddit forum at the center of the ongoing stock market frenzy called the recent coordinated strategy to pump up ailing stocks like GameStop and AMC a “ train wreck. ”
Jaime Rogozinski, 39, who founded Reddit’s r / WallStreetBets in 2012 as a platform to discuss unconventional investment strategies, expressed concern in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the astronomical increase in the forum’s influence.
“It’s a bit like watching one of those horror movies where you see the villain slowly going up the stairs,” Rogozinski told the paper.
“You can see this train wreck happening in real time.”
WallStreetBets has played a prominent role in driving GameStop and other similar companies, playing host to many of the amateur investors pushing up stock prices.
The move has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for hedge fund companies shorting those same companies.
Rogozinski, a married father of 3-year-old twins living in Mexico City, started WallStreetBets while working as an information technology consultant in Washington, DC, the report said.
In the initial phase, only a few thousand users were subscribed to the channel. Now, after being in the spotlight during the GameStop boom, the number of subscribers has exploded to 2 million.
“A huge group of people have organized where they have a joint seat at the poker table, which was previously by invitation only,” Rogozinski told the Journal.
“You can’t ignore them anymore.”
Despite being the founder, Rogozinski was kicked off the forum in April for trying to eliminate the hate speech that plagued the community.
“There were a handful of mods who were real white supremacists,” he said.
“I have very thick skin and people can say whatever they want to me, but at some point there is a moral point of view – like my kids, I don’t want them to think, ‘Well, they can say whatever they want about you , ” He told the newspaper.
To make matters worse, Rogozinski said he received a call last week from Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research – one of the companies that lost a lot to GameStop short circuits – who said WallStreetBets users were threatening his family.
Rogozinski suffered and condemned the threats, but there was not much he could do about it.
“It’s not what it used to be,” he said of the forum.