On Tuesday morning, Palihapitiya tweeted that he was buying $115,000 worth of GameStop stock, after asking followers what he should invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in. At least two people responded advising GameStop, the worth of which has skyrocketed in part due to big names like Elon Musk endorsing the stock and a rally to get the valuation up by the subreddit r/WallStreetBets.
Palihapitiya tweeted just after midnight on Wednesday that “today was a fun day,” sharing a meme someone created about him and Musk following popular a r/WallStreetBets user’s move to invest in GameStop.
During a Wednesday appearance on CNBC’s Halftime Report, Palihapitiya announced his plan to donate to Barstool Sports’ COVID-19 relief effort. “This morning I woke up after spending all last night on Wall Street Bets, reading about all this stuff. I ended up closing out my positions this morning, and I wanted to announce that I’m taking all the profits that I made plus my original position—so I’m gonna take $500,000—and I’m gonna donate to the Barstool Fund for small businesses,” he said.
Barstool Sports and Barstool President Dave Portnoy tweeted their thanks for the generous donation. A number of people on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit have expressed anger with Wall Street hedge funds for shorting stocks like GameStop—and that’s no doubt part of the motivation to drive up the stock’s price. A bunch of memes in the sub take glee in upsetting the system in which hedge funds thrive.
Portnoy joked on Twitter that, with this donation from Palihapitiya, he was “the official face of the revolution.” He also criticized CNBC’s coverage of everything going on with GameStop’s stock. “The only time CNBC and the Suits care about protection is when it’s the establishment getting their teeth kicked in. As long as the big banks are winning the stock market is great. The second retail takes the wheel it’s all unfair,” he wrote.
Palihapitiya responded to Portnoy with the acronym “LFG,” which stands for “Let’s f**king go.”
Portnoy’s made headlines with his recent efforts to help small businesses, which is a far cry from the controversies that have occasionally put him in the news in the past. In June 2020, Portnoy released a video saying that “Cancel Culture [was] finally coming for Barstool,” in response to outrage over old Barstool videos in which Portnoy used the n-word while rapping and made disparaging comments about NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
In December 2020, Portnoy launched the Barstool Fund to help small businesses that had been struggling due to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “Stool Presidente” established the fund with $500,000 and announced that he’d offer cash to businesses that had kept their employees on the payroll through the pandemic. “These people aren’t going out of business because they’re not successful or not making money, it’s because they have no other choice. It’s because they’ve been dealt a hand that nobody could play,” he said at the time.
Newsweek reached out to the Barstool Fund and Social Capital via email for comment.
