While the Reddit community WallStreetBets reached is most commonly associated with the 2021 GameStop meme stock mania, its creator has not been involved with the brand since April of the previous year. That was when Jaime Rogozinski was banned from the social media platform's subreddit for "attempting to monetize" the community known for coming up with high-risk trading strategies that have increasingly started to influence markets.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story on Feb. 15 that Rogozinski is suing Reddit for getting ousted after making moves to trademark "WallStreetBets." The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California's Oakland, claims that the ouster was meant to keep Rogozinski away from "a famous brand that helped Reddit rise to a $10 billion valuation."
READ MORE: Gamestop and Robinhood: What Drove Reddit in 2021
The r/WallStreetBets subreddit surpassed one million followers shortly after Rogozinski's ouster and has over 13.6 million followers now.
A dual U.S.-Mexico citizen, Rogozinski talked to TheStreet reporter Veronika Bondarenko about the lawsuit by phone from the latter country. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TheStreet: Tell me a bit about how you started s/WallStreetBets and the point that the community was at when you were banned in April 2020.
Rogozinski: In 2012, we started out by debating [the market] and tweaking [the online community] and learning from all of its twists and turns. The community itself is not just limited to WallStreetBets but obviously, the subreddit is by far its largest presence. In 2020, you're starting to see a lot of high-profile power moves where this retail collective is muscling its way into the poker table of Wall Street. It's becoming its own kind of contender.
It's nowhere near the existing contenders like the investment banks but they're now getting noticed. They're moving stock prices around, they're finding arbitrage that is highly sophisticated. It's expressed in the form of memes and crude language but they're exploring asymmetric risk and they're understanding market mechanics and in many cases making money from it. So that's where we are in 2020.
TheStreet: And then you get kicked out of Reddit?
Rogozinski: Yes. It's a massive blow. I go through all my stages of grief and acceptance. This thing originated in my head and I can conceive more ideas. I'm a fan of disrupting and creating rather than fighting and destroying so I just start to go about my business of delving into crypto and gamifying but I keep bumping into roadblocks because Reddit isn't happy enough that they've removed me from the subreddit, they're now preventing me from doing this on my own. [If getting kicked out was all that had happened], I'd still be really upset and have my grievances but I'd have moved on by now. But they're straight up saying "you can't take this with you."
TheStreet: Do you feel that your influence in the meme stock space is tied to the WallStreetBets brand?
Rogozinski: My ability to be a thought leader in this space has not gone away. I spend half the year traveling, giving speeches and talking about the market on the news. But my ability to take this brand that I created and that has a lot of power is what became difficult. I would need to come up with some completely new brand and start that from scratch. I'd be looking at another 10 years of building that up and that's just not fair.
WallStreet Bets
TheStreet: The official reason given for the ouster was that you were trying to "enrich yourself." Were you doing that?
Rogozinski: Have you written a book before? It's like super, super lucrative. Was I making money? Absolutely. I'm not going to comment too much on the legal side because that's for the lawyers but I wrote a book and I was promoting it on the subreddit as well as elsewhere. I put up my link to the book [among various other links put up by other moderators] and it was up there for months, no big deal. Then all of a sudden I submit my trademark application and boom, I get kicked out.
TheStreet: The lawsuit uses the word "betrayal." Did you feel betrayed by the other moderators, Reddit's corporate team, or the community at large?
Rogozinski: For the longest time, I was blaming the other moderators because there was some infighting and I was focused on that. I've been part of Reddit since before it was cool. I can give you references from when it was this trendy little thing in 2008. I refused to believe that Reddit knowingly did anything bad and focused my ire on the moderators.
But then when I didn't get any traction on [getting unbanned] and I started getting ghosted by Reddit, it didn't make any sense whatsoever. The only time I heard back from them after years of [trying to bring up different unrelated issues over the years] was with this trademark application. They're a social media company, they rely on people coming to their site and creating content. They don't pretend to create any of these things, especially not WallStreetBets.
I was confounded by the entire thing and then everything I was unable to explain suddenly started making sense. This thing is valuable. I know it's valuable — that's why I created it, that's why I want it and that's why everyone's fighting for.
TheStreet: Are you a fan of the 1989 movie 'Field of Dreams'? "If you build it, they will come" is quoted in the lawsuit to argue that what really happened was "if you build it, we will take it from you."
Rogozinski: No, that was my lawyer. I worked with my lawyer on all the major arguments but he knows I'm a loose cannon. That was his poetic expression.
Reddit Responds to Lawsuit
A Reddit spokesperson called Rogozinski's lawsuit "completely frivolous" and having "no basis in reality.".
"It's telling that he is filing this suit three years after he was banned by r/WallStreetBets and long after the community rose in mainstream popularity without his involvement," the spokesperson said in a statement for TheStreet. "We’ll respond directly in court and continue to protect the best interests of the communities and moderators on our platform."
