The creator of the Reddit forum, at the center of the ongoing stock market frenzy, called the recent coordinated strategy to bomb stocks with problems like GameStop and AMC a “train wreck”.
Jaime Rogozinski, 39, who established Reddit’s r / WallStreetBets in 2012 as a platform to discuss unconventional investment strategies, expressed his displeasure at the forum’s astronomical rise in influence in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a bit like watching one of those horror movies where you can see the bad guy slowly climbing the stairs,” Rogozinski told the newspaper.
“You see this train wreck happening in real time.”
WallStreetBets has played a prominent role in driving GameStop and other similar companies down, welcoming many amateur investors who are raising stock prices.
The move has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for hedge fund companies that caused a short circuit in those same businesses.
Rogozinski, a married father of three-year-old twins living in Mexico City, started WallStreetBets while working as an information technology consultant in Washington, DC, according to the report.
In the early stages, only a few thousand users subscribed to the channel. Now, having starred in the GameStop boom, the number of subscribers has risen to 2 million.
“A massive group of people has organized where they collectively have a seat at the poker table, which was previously only for invitations,” Rogozinski told the newspaper.
“You can no longer ignore them.”
Despite being its founder, Rogozinski was expelled from the forum in April for trying to eliminate the hate speech that plagued the community.
“There were a handful of mods that were white supremacists,” he said.
“I have very thick skin and people can tell me whatever they want, but at some point there’s a moral point of view: like with my kids, I don’t want them to think,‘ Well, they can say whatever they want from you “He told the newspaper.
In addition to adding insult to injury, Rogozinski said he received a call last week from Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research, one of the companies that lost a lot due to the GameStop short circuit, which he said WallStreetBets users threatened his family.
Rogozinski worried and condemned the threats, but could do nothing about it.
“It’s no longer what it used to be,” he said on the forum.