The GameStop stock-shorting situation sounds like the stuff of fiction—but it’s very real. The story, as you may have heard, involves a surprising stock market event and a Reddit attack that has left a hedge fund out of, well, funds, and made some regular people rich—or prevented them from claiming their riches via a stock trading and investing app now ironically called Robinhood.
If all that sounds like a doozy, it’s because it’s the kind of thing most of us would only understand if Margot Robbie (or at least Trevor Noah) explained it to us from a bathtub, using smaller words and maybe some sort of diagram. Or, even better, if it took center stage in an episode of Billions—the sexy Showtime melodrama about hedonistic hedge fund managers that’s both ridiculous and apparently accurate about said hedge fund managers. Just don’t ask the show’s cocreator, Brian Koppelman, to build a season around it. He’s spent the past day playfully retweeting and responding to tweets in which fans demand that his show takes on this bizarre (and bizarrely depressing) Wall Street phenomenon, as though the idea would not have occurred to Koppelman without their pointing it out.
“Thanks for this insight,” he told the umpteenth fan to tweet at him that “there’s definitely enough material from the last week for a new episode of Billions.” “Hadn’t occurred,” he offered to another, who expressed curiosity at how Damian Lewis’s character Bobby Axelrod “would be handling this situation right now.”
Koppelman even had a word for business journalists who have gotten in on the act—though can you blame them? Those who aren’t on the health and science or politics beats have spent the last several months just waiting for a story like this to pop out of the ether. No, Brian, we don’t have anything better to do!
So: How about that episode?
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