Neil Freiman

essentially heroes.

But then in the past few years, the reputation has completely flipped.

And I think what may have done that, what may have sparked that is the GameStop meme stock frenzy of 2021 and 2022, where a lot of hedge funds had short positions in GameStop and people on Reddit rallied against that and short squeezed them and sent a bunch of them, uh,

to huge financial losses.

And I mean, Andrew Left even said that.

He said, when we started Citron, it was to be against the establishment.

Now we've actually become the establishment.

All right, let's get into the arguments of this particular case.

The government is accusing Andrew Left of misleading posts on social media and going on CNBC and saying basically fraudulent statements.

It's not just that he took short positions and talked about them.

It's that he misled the public into thinking that he had particular interests.

investments when he did not.

So one example was this is on January 8th, 2019, according to the government in this suit, left opened short positions on Roku, then went to Citron's Twitter account at 941 a.m., called Roku, quote, uninvestable, sent the stock down.

And he also said at the same time that he was, quote, watching Roku from the side.

So telling the public, hey, I don't really have anything

I don't have any really stock in this or any financial interest in this.

I'm just telling you that Roku is uninvestable.

But actually, the government accuses him of making $700,000 from his short that particular day.

They have a few other examples of him doing this with other stocks like American Airlines saying, yeah, I think this stock is going to go down.

And then actually selling that stock just a few minutes later after he posted those tweets or went on to CNBC and making millions of dollars per day doing this.