Jon Stewart joins Twitter to weigh in on the GameStop stock controversy

If you’ve been seeing the video game retailer GameStop in headlines lately, the reason for the sudden interest is much more complicated than the release of a new edition of Call of Duty. The stock for the flailing retailer has skyrocketed (rocket emojis) over the past week thanks to a group of Reddit users. Millions are at stake, Wall Street has been upended, legal ramifications are being examined and suddenly everyone and their mother is interested in the stock market. How big of a deal is this? Enough for Jon Stewart to finally join social media in 2021.

Stewart is weighing in on the controversy that has dominated the stock market for the past week, including the latest development, which sees stock trading app Robinhood announcing that users can no longer buy GameStop stock, only sell it.

Referencing the economic collapse of 2008, which decimated the US housing market and left millions of people destitute, Stewart tweeted, “The Redditors aren't cheating, they're joining a party Wall Street insiders have been enjoying for years.”

The comedian and former host of The Daily Show sent only one other tweet on January 28, promising that his social media appearances would be ‘sporadic and ineffective.’

Stewart’s Daily Show successor Trevor Noah has also weighed in on the GameStop controversy. The comedian used a clip from the 2015 comedy The Big Short, which centered on the 2008 recession. If you can get past the jarring image of Noah’s head superimposed on Margot Robbie’s body, the host does an excellent job of explaining the current situation on Wall Street. Maybe just listen without looking at your screen.

New York district representative and real-life superhero Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also spoken out against Robinhood’s move to stop free trade of GameStop stock among its users.

Rapper Ja Rule has also weighed in and advised fans to not sell their stocks, just a little less eloquently.

There’s a lot of jargon and industry-specific terms surrounding the recent events on Wall Street and YouTuber Tom Nash does a great job of quickly explaining what it means for a company like GameStop to be short stocked.

Stocks that have been shorted typically belong to companies that are struggling, like brick and mortar retailer GameStop and movie theatre chain AMC. The list of stocks that have been shorted are public knowledge, which is how a group of six million Redditors called WallStreetBets were able to decide on GameStop as the company they would collectively support as individual investors.

When Redditors began buying up GameStop stocks, they sent the price of the stock up. Hedge fund managers and professional investors who had shorted the stock were unable to cover the difference between the price they had borrowed the stock at and what it was currently valued at after the surge.

As of Friday, January 29, GameStop stock was worth $349, down from the all-time high of $492.02 the day before. The stock has gone up 2,752% this month. In comparison, GameStop share was at its lowest in the summer of 2019 when it was $3.30 per share.

There are several facets to the GameStop saga that all have major impacts on the market. A handful of major hedge funds have gone out of business this week because of the GameStop stock surge and now Redditors have their sights set on AMC and Canadian mobile company BlackBerry, which was largely decimated following the introduction of the iPhone. While thousands of individual investors have suddenly found themselves very rich, the GameStop stock is bound to crash since there’s no actual change in the company’s business driving the increase. Earnings on stocks are heavily taxed and whether non-professional investors who are new to the stock market have taken that into consideration could have a major impact on their financial stability. Investing in one stock without diversifying is also risky and people borrowing against their debt may get burned when the stock inevitably plummets.

One thing that continues to be clear is that organized online communities can have a massive impact on society. The Reddit community is drawing comparisons to K Pop fans, who have successfully impacted Trump rallys and drowned out white supremacist hashtags on social media.

Before you go: Jon Stewart is returning to TV with a new series

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