The founder of WallStreetBetsthe community responsible for the frenzy of ‘meme actions’ at Wall Street, sued the forum on Wednesday Reddit.
Jaime Rogozinski noted that the platform expelled him, accusing him of “wrongly prohibiting him from moderating the community and undermining its trademark rights.”
WallStreetBets vs. Reddit
According to Rogozinski, Reddit accused him of violating the policy of “attempting to monetize a community” as a pretext to avoid controlling “the brand that helped to Reddit to reach a $10 billion valuation round.”
The complaint was filed in federal court in Oakland, California, and details that Rogozinski applied for the trademark “WallStreetBets” in March 2020, when the community reached 1 million subscribers.
Since that date, the community grew by leaps and bounds, now reaching 13.6 million subscribers.
As part of his lawsuit, the subreddit’s creator is seeking at least $1 million for breach of contract and a ban on the use of WallStreetBets by Reddit unless he is reinstated as lead moderator.
“This is a completely frivolous lawsuit with no basis in reality,” said a spokeswoman for Reddit. “Jamie was removed as moderator of r/WallStreetBets by. Reddit and the community moderators banned him for attempting to enrich himself. This lawsuit is another transparent attempt to enrich himself.”
History of the internet
The youth of WallStreetBets caused one of the most incredible events in the U.S. stock market.
Users realized that many multimillionaires were getting even richer in Wall Street betting short (that their stock would continue to fall) on companies whose services were actually falling such as physical video game stores. (GameStop), movie theaters in the midst of pandemic (AMC) and retired telephone brands (BlackBerry). So they started pooling their money to invest in these companies, increasing the value of their shares and causing the giants’ bets to fail. In this way, while they made money, they also put in check the biggest exponents of Wall Street and most of them without any prior research: all thanks to some memes.
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