Dumb Money(2023)

Told with the snark and irreverence of The Big Short, and with a spectacular cast, this film depicts the grassroots effort to support GameStop’s stock in the face of large hedge funds that can leverage their enormous capital resources to inflate and deflate stock prices, buy companies to drain the money from them, sell them, and put companies out of business at the expense of workers.

Keith Gill (Paul Dano) from his basement, unwittingly organizes tens of thousands of people through his podcast supporting the GameStop stock. Social media spreads his podcast like wildfire and the investing tool Robinhood becomes the platform for folks to invest in GameStop stock.

The large hedge funds, whose owners are depicted hilariously by Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Nick Offerman, are caught completely off guard. They were short selling GameStop, expecting the company to fail, and the rise in the stock price costs them billions of dollars.

The Robinhood investing platform doesn’t anticipate the volume of sales. The platform founders’
(played by Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota), idealism is shattered when they have to borrow money from hedge funds to keep the company afloat.

Some people wind up making money, and some people lose money depending on when they invested and when they sold their stock. Gill successfully testifies before the United States House Committee on Financial Services. (The best scene in the movie is where Gill’s brother, played by Pete Davidson, Gill’s wife, played by Shailene Woodley, and Gill’s friend, played by Deniz Akdeniz prep him for his testimony.) The hedge fund managers’ testimony is ineffective and Kenneth Griffin’s testimony was later found to include falsehoods.

In the end, Melvin Capital goes out of business, hedge funds now monitor what’s going on with these new investing platforms, Gill makes over $17 million, ends his podcast, and Gill and his brother go “running with their dicks out” at night during a thunderstorm at the local running track.