I Like the Stock! How Dumb Money Scratches That ‘Eat the Rich’ Itch
It’s the internet uprising that nobody saw coming. Meet Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill, the man who spied a chink in the hyper-wealthy’s armour and took it to the moon.
good.film
a year ago
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Why should I see Dumb Money?
It makes high-end finance accessible and funny, with a deeply satisfying reminder that sometimes, “we the people” can still buck a system that’s designed to screw us.
What social causes does the film explore?
Democracy & Society, Poverty & Inequality, Family & Community
Noticed an entirely new entertainment genre popping up on your screens lately? It seems that ever since COVID struck, stories of the obnoxiously wealthy meeting their sticky comeuppance have been all the rage. Sure, it’s not a “real” genre like say, comedy, drama, thriller or Real Housewives (kidding not kidding). But it’s definitely a thing. We call it (drumroll)... “Eat the Rich.”
Emmy-winning The White Lotus saw a bunch of snobby elites pilloried and satirised along wealth & racial inequity lines. Triangle of Sadness won the Cannes Palme d’Or and landed a surprise Best Picture Oscar nomination for its skewering of yet more snobby elites on a doomed superyacht. And The Menu booked us seats at a hyper-exclusive restaurant for a shocking takedown of… you guessed it, snobby elites.
Enter Dumb Money, the new social and financial satire from director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya). A fizzy cast led by Paul Dano retells the fusion of that weird time when COVID hit and the world went haywire. People felt confused, anxious, and lost trust that “the system” had their backs. People were angry. The pot was bubbling. And for the first time in history, a global event kept us apart… while technology kept us connected. That’s a recipe for a digital uprising.
What was the GameStop saga?
Think “BlockBuster video”, but with a twist. Back in 2019, GameStop were a struggling chain of bricks & mortar video game stores on the brink, losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Wall Street smelled blood and did what they do best: bet big that GameStop's stock would nosedive. Mario fans would call it a real Bowser move.
What they didn’t count on was the internet warriors of Reddit springing out of the (digital) woodwork - specifically a group called r/WallStreetBets. They were galvanised by an underground stock punter named Keith Gill, better known by his YouTube alias: Roaring Kitty. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
Using a string of metrics and gut intuition, Keith sank $53,000 - his entire life savings - into the stock, and urged his loyal (and growing) YouTube following to buy it too. Perhaps bored by lockdowns, desperate for an alternative income stream during the pandemic, or just feeling like exercising some power in a powerless time, they did exactly that.
Banding together in a sort of online Rebel Alliance, thousands of small-time investors dug in to create a “short squeeze”: buying up - and refusing to sell - shares in an effort to beat the Wall Street hedge funds at their own game. And it worked.
The “GME” stock price skyrocketed over 1,600% and hedge funds were forced to buy back the stock they bet against at eye-wateringly inflated prices, losing billions. It’s a David vs. Goliath story that became folkloric for symbolising how “the little guy” can disrupt an unjust system, armed only with an internet connection and a common fury.
Let’s be real, though: regular investors didn’t jump into GameStop purely out of kindness. Diamond-hands and kitty-memes aside, the lure of a sudden payday was surely the most obvious motivator. As Vox points out, “Some everyday investors won, some lost, and plenty were just in it for the casino-like ride. Most retail investors try to make money, not remake the system, and most don’t even do that. Piling into a meme stock isn’t upending capitalism.”
What does Dumb Money have to say about financial inequity?
We catch pretty quickly that Keith Gill is on the lower rung of middle class: he’s a financial analyst, but far from a high-flyer. In providing for his family he juuust scrapes by; in his spare time he dons his trademark red headband and fires up the ‘Roaring Kitty’ trading channel - live streaming direct from his basement.
Soon, he’s analysed GameStop and seizes on the find, telling his viewers, “I just like the stock.”
Keith is the nucleus that other characters in this story swirl around: through his home life, we meet his wife and parents, who are worried and shocked that he’s tipped his life savings into a risky bet. Following his YouTube channel avidly are Jennifer, a nurse on the frontlines of COVID who’s trapped in a cycle of debt, Riri and Harmony, a college couple with student loans to pay, and Marcos, a Latino employee at one of GameStop’s stores.
They all invest on instinct, echoing Keith’s own mantra: “I just like the guy. If he’s in, I’m in.”
Here’s who doesn’t like the guy: hedge fund CEOs like Gabe Plotkin (net worth: $400 million) and uber-shark Ken Griffin (net worth: $29 billion). These guys literally refer to small-time investors as “dumb money”, and they made what they thought was a smart bet - that GameStop was on the path to failure. If it goes down, they win big.
But if the stock shoots up, they bleed a billion a day. And these guys are NOT used to bleeding.
Where Dumb Money makes its sharpest point is by contrasting the lives of the 0.1% (like Plotkin and Griffin) against people like Keith, his family, and Jennifer. It’s a reflection of the increasing levels of vast economic inequality in the US, where regular, middle-income households have shrunk from over 61% of the population in the 1970s, to less than 51% in 2019. The entire money landscape has changed. As NYU Marketing Professor Scott Galloway puts it, “The centre of gravity is shifting from public to private capital… the markets [today] are increasingly a mechanism for transferring wealth from young to old, poor to rich, and public to private.”
Cutting between characters and their stories, the bitter disparity Gillespie presents to us is so strong you can almost taste it. While Gabe & Ken sip $15 iced teas at their country club, Jennifer pulls 15-hour shifts to afford her kid’s braces. Where the CEO worth billions would barely bat an eye at a $150,000 trade, the same amount would cover Riri and Harmony’s entire student loan debt. And Marcos’s Latina mother scoffs when he promises to “buy her a mansion one day” - for people like her, that’s a complete fantasy; a dream.
How does Dumb Money explore family, community and the pandemic?
It’s a dark irony that during a pandemic costing people their livelihoods, the uber-wealthy were relatively immune from financial consequences. According to Oxfam, the world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes during the first two years of COVID.
For the fortunate few, the pandemic rolled off them like champagne off a duck’s back while millions lost their jobs, their homes and their lives. The film seems to be asking in disbelief: How were things allowed to get like this? How can this be right?
Keith Gill’s sister Sarah was one of the loved ones lost in 2020, six months before the events of the film. It’s an aspect that, while not directly affecting the plot, colours and shapes so much of Gill’s motivation as a character. He doubles down on his “bet” because he wants to provide for his family. He wants to make his grieving parents proud. And while he can’t make sense of a global virus or his sister’s death, he can still make sense of numbers, stocks and trades.
Gill’s hunch was that, with not much else to do, Gen Xers and Zs would play more video games, spiking GameStop’s revenue. He was right, but more crucial than his logic was his belief in the stock. He knew in his bones that it was undervalued, and his “diamond hands” - finance-speak for refusing to sell - won him an army of Reddit converts.
Seemingly overnight, Gill became a cult leader to a band of bored punters who held fast to a collective cause that was less about a meme stock and more about bringing down ‘the man’. And while we’ll never know for sure if the GameStop saga would’ve happened without the cloud of COVID-19, it seems unlikely.
Without lockdowns, would ‘Roaring Kitty’ have ever gained its cult following? As British GQ described it, “there’s a sadness hanging over ‘Dumb Money’... its characters are desperate people and GameStop was a release for them, furnishing this online community with a purpose.”
I loved The Wolf of Wall Street. Will I like Dumb Money?
You bet. While Dumb Money mightn’t match the sheer savagery (and vicarious thrill) of Scorsese’s Leo-starring masterpiece, it’s a similarly fun ride: a multi-charactered fusion of tech, finance and sweaty panic you almost can’t believe, until you remember it’s true.
In the same vein as The Big Short or The Social Network, Dumb Money has a ton of explaining to do to get us comfortable with concepts like share trading, short squeezing, buybacks and hedge funds (the film is actually based on the book “The Antisocial Network” by Ben Mezrich, who also wrote the book that The Social Network was adapted from).
But anytime finance-bro lingo threatens to overwhelm you, the filmmakers chuck in a blazing graphic montage, a burst of funny Reddit comments or a supercut of Keith’s YouTube appearances to keep us engaged and in the know.
What are critics saying about Dumb Money?
“Highlights how, especially during the turbulent times of COVID, social media could be a lifeline, a way to connect with other people.” - Dominic Baez, Seattle Times
“As an illustration of how unserious and unimpressive the smartest guys in the financial room can be, it hits a bullseye.” - Alex Kirshner, Slate
“Gillespie’s latest is an enraging David vs. Goliath, ripped-from-the-headlines tale that deserves to be seen to be believed.” - Manuel Betancourt, AV Club
“Sturdy, lively, lucid and informative about the rotten state of the American dream.” - Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
So what’s the takeaway from Dumb Money?
We’re calling it: the ultra-wealthy are cinema’s new villains. We all cheer for the underdog (or in Keith’s case, the under-kitty), and there’s nothing less underdog than having a few dozen zeroes at the end of your bank balance.
Dumb Money is a film that knows its audience. We ARE the worried nurse. We ARE the indebted student. We ARE the DoorDash driver. We’re the ones who feel screwed over; tricked and enraged by a system that promised freedom from debt and ran away laughing. Companies so engorged with other people’s money they thought they could get away with anything.
Yet the GameStop story takes us to a place where finally, for once - even briefly - it’s US who get to laugh all the way to the bank. It sets a feeling that goes deeper than finding a brand new Porsche with a bow on top sitting in your driveway. It’s an electrifying catharsis that unravels the modern-day knot we all feel in our guts: that somewhere along the line, things got cripplingly unfair.
As Keith Gill sums up in his pivotal testimony before the Finance Committee investigation that caps off the film, “A lot of people feel the system is broken. The whole idea of the stock market is that if you’re smart and with a little luck, you can make your fortune. Certainly not anymore. There was no hope for the little guy. Maybe now, there is.”
