Ja Rule speaks out on Robinhood, GameStop stock chaos
By Alexandra Steigrad
Ja Rule is a huge investor in GameStop. Rapper Ja Rule, one of GameStop’s more famous investors, wants the little guy to keep trading.
The Grammy-nominated artist joined CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” Monday to talk all things GameStop and Robinhood, after the millennial investing app restricted trading on some stocks.
“I love Robinhood. It puts the stock market in your pocket,” he said. “But I was really upset at what they did the other day. It kind of felt like everything they stood for - even their name, you know, Robinhood - kind of went in the dumps on what they did by freezing some of the trading on some of the stocks.”
His tone was much less emphatic than it was on Thursday, when he bought the heavily shorted GameStop.
“Yo this is a f-king CRIME what @RobinhoodApp is doing,” Ja Rule tweeted Thursday.
“DO NOT SELL!!! HOLD THE LINE… WTF.”
But on Monday, the rapper, who was interviewed from what appeared to be his home office, kept looking to his computer screen while answering questions in a more muted tone.
After giving a “shoutout” to Reddit’s WallStreetbets investors who are “shaking things up” and driving up meme stocks like GameStop, AMC and Blackberry, Ja Rule said: “My advice to whoever who is following what’s going on is to be very careful.”
“There have been some people who made some money on those stocks of course, but be very careful, there have also been a lot of people who have lost money on those stocks,” he said.
Ja Rule, who was the co-founder of fraudulent luxury music festival, Fyre Festival, was then asked to share his views on the similar viral craze engulfing Robinhood and shorted stocks of companies like AMC and GameStop that are “doing badly.”
Instead of drawing a parallel between Robinhood and the quick demise of Fyre, which was built on social media hype and fraudulent deals, he said.
“Robinhood gotta let people trade. You gotta people trade, man.,” he said. “I think the real situation that’s going on is, I don’t think the CEO had the money to cover the actual money that was going through the platform, you know the margins. I don’t think he had enough to cover the margins. I think that’s what the freezing is about.”
“It just looks like he’s playing into the hands of the big Wall Street and the big hedge fund guys, like he’s siding with those guys, instead of letting the little guy trade.” he said.
“People are mad, people are angry and they should be,” the rapper continued. “This is the app that claims it is about free trade and they took that power away from people.”