Netflix’s “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” is a fun watch, but that’s it

The massive short squeeze of 2020’s GameStop is coming back, but this time as a documentary.

“Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” is a new three-part Netflix documentary based on the GameStop short squeeze back in 2020. A short squeeze is when investors bet for a stock’s downfall, but prices rise instead, and although the documentary tries to explain what, why, and how it happened, the first episode was the only one to do it well. The rest of the documentary is a bit shallow as it is missing some information but keeps you entertained throughout with funny moments and good scene transitions.

Part one, titled “I Like the Stock,” gives the viewer a brief overview of the series and what’s to come. It starts by giving you an introduction to the whole GameStop stock situation and follows with explanations as to what hedge funds do with dying stock like it. Retail investors, people who invest small lumps of money, figure out what hedge funds are trying to do and try to stop them from profiting off a dying stock.

Part two of the documentary was titled “To the Moon,” which was probably the most enjoyable part of the series. It goes more into depth of how the interviewees started their GameStop stock trade. Alongside this personalization, this episode highlighted the entire rise of the stock. It showed a multitude of reasons why the price kept going up and up; with the largest contributor to the boom being a tweet from Elon Musk saying “GameStonk.” This would eventually lead to GameStop reaching its highest value. The episode then ended on a cliffhanger; Robinhood, the largest retail investor interface, blocked out the purchase button.

The final part titled “The Reckoning” truly represented what was to come since the moment the purchase button was blocked, the price of Gamestop plummeted almost as fast as it went up. Due to this sudden drop in the value of GameStop stock, everyone who was involved began to fear what would happen to their investments. With the only thing that people could do on Robinhood, many people began to sell. Ultimately, the price of the stock never went back up as high as it did, and people wanted to place the blame of that on someone. 

Despite the fact that Netflix’s three-part documentary “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” was missing a lot of information regarding the entire situation nearing the end of the short squeeze, it was still enjoyable to watch. Many people had strong beliefs due to their views pertaining to their finances, and shared their opinions on review sites such as IMDb. One person by the name of Superstonk shared their opinion on the missing information by saying “This documentary doesn’t mention the true story of WallStreetBets users actually migrated to Superstonk subreddit due to the moderators being paid off by hedge funds.” 

After digging into the history of these various subreddits, people did actually migrate from WallStreetBets. Many users first went to the subreddit GME, and then to Superstonk. A Reddit user by the name of Puzzle666 explained that it was because of the massive influx of untrustworthy people in the community, such as bots and shills, and even paid-off moderators. This information should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as Reddit is a community board-like space where anyone can post anything. Although, this information came from a highly upvoted post, meaning that many members of the subreddit agreed with what it had to say.

Overall, the documentary was worth watching for entertainment reasons, but maybe not so much in terms of knowledge.