The latest episode of the WAN show from Linus Tech Tips streamed live about 3 hours ago (at the time of writing).
Naturally, with the crazy events of the stock market, Linus and Luke discussed the latest in the ongoing saga that is /r/WallStreetBets. The episode started off with an attempt at explaining how shorting stock works and the battle between retail and institutional investors.
While the explanation may have been a little rough, the overall message of support for what is happening in the reddit and discord communities was not. Linus fully supported the movement of applying pressure to those who make a living moving money around, rather than creating value.
To put some money where his mouth is, Linus announced on the live stream, that he would take the total value of YouTube Super Chats donated during the stream, and 5x that to arrive at an amount to then buy shares in Gamestop ($GME).
Fairly predictably, things got out of hand quickly, with the total reaching $10k in just a few minutes. As the episode continued, it was clear there was not stopping the community and with the news shared to Reddit, there needed to be a cap.
Linus set that cap at $50k, well more than the original amount he had in mind. Next came the awkward phone call (also live on the air), where he had to inform her that they were about to take US$50k and buy shares in Gamestop because he ran his mouth.
You can watch the full episode below and honestly, this is one of my favourite moments on YouTube in quite a while. If you want to jump straight to the call, that starts at 37 minutes, 42 seconds into the video.
“Why do you do things?”
So how is that going for him now? I just have trouble believing someone could be so stupid, there must be something wrong with their reality filter because they are not living in the real world. He has just blown 40 thousand dollars. I’d like to see the call with his wife over that.
He’s up $25k lel