Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is now streaming on Netflix.
Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga does an admirable job boiling down the events from early 2021, wherein a group of stuck-at-home day traders used the Robinhood app to buy up shares of the bottoming-out GameStop. This short-squeeze, as it’s called, drove up the price of the stocks while also putting in jeopardy several of the hedge funds that had bet on the company’s impending failure. At the time, it was a story that inspired a kind of car wreck fascination while various TV talking heads quickly labeled it a “David vs. Goliath” story.
Of course, once the fleeting fancy had passed and the media spotlight moved on, the stock eventually settled back to its level at or near the basement, a lot of retail investors lost a lot of money, and the hedge funds went right back on doing what they do –– shorting stocks and betting on other people’s economic misery. Cynical? Perhaps, but it’s a reality the new Netflix documentary series zeroes in on while trying to make a fairly complicated topic something the wider audience can get its arms around.
While a dramatized version of these events starring Seth Rogen and Pete Davidson is on the way, this documentary feels like a good enough summation to do the trick, putting some human faces on the story. Directed by Theo Love (The Legend of Cocaine Island), the three-part series (which, at under 120 minutes, could –– and probably should –– easily have been one feature-length special) casts its focus on the events surrounding the GameStop surge by first contextualizing the state-of-play circa early 2021. The pandemic had left many workers at home with either no jobs, more time, or both, and the launch of the Robinhood app a few years prior made investing easy for many who wouldn’t have otherwise considered it.
Part of what Love does well is to specifically zero in on a handful of “regular people” investors who interfaced with the GameStop stock at varied times during its skyrocketing journey, such as house husband Eddie Koo and aspiring rapper Mikey Guggenheim (we could’ve done without showcasing Guggenheim’s wannabe raps, though). Some made out spectacularly when the dust settled, others less so, but they’re all the kind of people who generally aren’t expected to make their voices heard in the financial market. In contrast, Love also makes sure to give time to several hedge fund managers (some of whom are so cartoonishly conceited they’re practically daring viewers to boo and hiss) who offer their own perspectives on what does and doesn’t constitute a viable stock based on decades of experience in the financial industry.
In the age of social media, such wisdom from on high was no longer necessary, and with the arrival of Reddit forum wallstreetbets, we suddenly saw the rise of “meme stocks” which Redditors gleefully weaponized as a way to stick it to the fat cats. That’s obviously a reductive way to discuss what was and is a complicated, multi-pronged situation, with few clear cut “bad guys” and “good guys,” but social media has a way of boiling off the nuance from most discussions. And so you had TV personalities like Mad Money’s Jim Cramer –– who initially cheered on the Redditors driving up GameStop’s prices and encouraged them to cash out while they could –– being lampooned and belittled online, leading him to wonder aloud in the doc what he did wrong.
Now, rather than get lost in the weeds of jargon, the doc borrows a trick from Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short by weaving in explainers to take some fairly arcane Wall Street concepts and lay them out with funny pictures, animation, and captioned gifs. It’s not quite School House Rock but it’s doing something similar. All of this is helpful as a way to recognize not merely how abnormal it was for any stock to do what GameStop did, but also, ultimately, how the system is set up in a way that an event like this repeating itself is unlikely at best.
Theo Love’s Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is a breezy, easily digested summary of events recent enough to feel timely.
That’s the final, sobering realization one has at the end of part three. Robinhood, the app that was supposed to put the power of Wall Street in the hands of everyday folks, was just another way to separate them from their money – another system of control. The same financial system that has ensured the exorbitantly wealthy can continue to grow their wealth in exorbitant fashion is engineered in such fashion that those on the outside will rarely do anything but be on the outside looking in. The GameStop Saga was one instance where the tables got turned, but the mere fact of it happening once makes it all the more unlikely it will ever happen again.
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