Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images, Dado Ruvic/Reuters
- Since Saturday, Redditors have donated more than $300,000 to a gorilla conservation fund.
- One used the name "GameStop": the retailer whose stock Redditors sent surging after hedge funds tried to short it.
- The fund's homepage now features subreddit Wall Street Bets' motto: "apes together strong."
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Wall Street Bets users on Reddit now have a new target after taking on hedge funds: gorillas.
Since Saturday, users have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars adopting apes through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
And, in return, the homepage of the Atlanta-based Fund's website now features the subreddit's motto: "apes together strong."
On Saturday, a Redditor posted in Wall Street Bets – whose members played a huge role in the stock market saga in which traders saved video games retailer GameStop from being shorted by prominent hedge funds – that they had adopted an infant gorilla using the name "GameStop."
The Redditor chose the animal in reference to how members of the subreddit call each other "apes," the Fund said.
-Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) March 15, 2021
After the user posted and photo, thousands of other Redditors joined in and made donations.
The Fund said that it typically receives around 20 new adoptions over the course of a weekend. Last weekend, it recorded more than 2,000.
By Tuesday afternoon, Redditors had donated $338,000, it said. It added the subreddit's motto to its homepage and its CEO posted a video on Wall Street Bets thanking users for their donations.
The Fund said it would use the funds for its field programs, which track and study wild gorillas and their habitats.
It added that "as it turns out, gorillas are a great investment" because saving gorillas helps save the planet.
-Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) March 15, 2021
Redditors said that this showed the difference between hedge funds and retail investors.
"This is the sort of thing that happens when people unaccustomed to having money suddenly get some," one said.
2021 will mark the year "a bunch of 'trolls' on a Reddit forum single handedly saved an endangered species," another said.
The GameStop saga happened in January when day traders banded together on Reddit to help bump up the prices of several stocks - most notably GameStop but also AMC, BlackBerry, and Nokia - after noticing that hedge funds were betting against them.
GameStop stock jumped from below $5 late last year to a peak of more than $450 a share on January 28.
As a result, some of Wall Street's prominent hedge funds were forced to close their bearish bets against the company, with hefty losses.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and Redditor Keith Gill, known more widely by his YouTube name Roaring Kitty, both testified at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in February.
Huffman told the committee that investing advice on Reddit was "among the best."