The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.

It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”

OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.

Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.