Glenn Greenwald on Reddit traders vowing to drive GameStop stock up to $1,000

It has also enriched a lot of people who bought at $20 or even $30 or $40 or $100, and the stock is now at $350 with no sign of it going down because they're vowing to hold onto the stock and even drive it up to $1,000 a share.  That's the vow on Reddit.  We'll see if that happens or not. 

~ Glenn Greenwald, "The Reddit Revolution, GameStop and Melvin Capital," 15:40 mark, January 28, 2021

Glenn Greenwald on the GameStop wealth transfer: "it's like a very effective populist uprising"

Clearly there are a lot of rich investors, a lot of probably big Wall Street people, even institutional investors, who profited along the way and what the ratio is between small Redditers and these bigger actors is unclear, but nonetheless, there is no question that it germinated in Reddit in the subthread, that at least some of these people have become wealthy whereas two weeks ago they were probably struggling or poor. And it really is, if you think about it in those terms, a massive transfer of wealth from hedge fund managers - just billions of dollars - transferred to Reddit users, and that's why it has caused so much fascination because it's like a very effective populist uprising against these hedge funds. And it's also causing an extreme amount of concern and worry for the same reason on the part of Wall Street, their media allies - people saying "this needs to stopped right away, we can't have this." Essentially, as several leftist commentators and right wing commentators have said, the reaction seems to be, "oh, wait, the wrong people are manipulating Wall Street for their own interests."

~ Glenn Greenwald, " 14:00 mark

Glenn Greenwald on GameStop and market manipulation

They knew that by playing the game that these hedge fund managers typically play, which is manipulating the market for their own benefit, they could also enrich themselves. Now, if manipulating the market to the enrichment of the people doing it is what Wall Street does every day - it's what hedge funds do all the time - the only thing that is different in this case is that instead of hedge fund billionaires making billions of dollars and getting rich off market manipulation, its a bunch of anonymous Reddit trolls who have bounded together to do it. 

~ Glenn Greenwald, "The Reddit Rebellion: Gameplay and Melvin Capital," 11:20 mark, January 28, 2021