Heroes in Wall Street Bets community spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to adopt gorillas

Instead of the traditional hedge fund “benefactor” routes that often entail yachts or recreational drugs, the Reddit community has a different cause in mind.

r/wallstreetbets are dumping their money into gorilla stocks. The reason this happened in the first place is thanks to the inclusion of the animal in the routine memes from the WSB subreddit.

"we'll create a whole forest for them to roam freely and call it tendieland," writes zxc369.

They rallied largely behind https://gorillafund.org. By going to the site’s adopt page, users can spend anywhere from $60 to $150 to help support monitoring wild gorillas. It’s a symbolic gesture. You don’t get to purchase wild animals directly. Instead they’ll give you a adoption certificate with a full-color photo of the gorilla you’re helping (a bunch of nice shots in fact), a digital subscription to the quarterly Gorilla Journal newsletter, a special video of your new gorilla pal, and finally the site promises to check back in with you yearly and give status updates on how the gorilla is doing.

Further updates indicate a skyrocketing response from the community. In a thread, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund says they usually get “20 new adoptions” in a weekend.

As of seven hours ago the Wall Street Bets community is responsible for “2000 new adoptions totaling over $265k.” In the last hour a follow-up tweet announces that total is now at $301k.

Over the weekend, Dr. Tara Stoinski publicly thanked the generosity of the community in a video response.

A wholesome update for the subreddit that last week managed to make headlines for causing an usual spike, then dip, then recovery from said dip of the GME stock price. Which in itself has been at it these past couple of months after a renewed interest in amateur investment of meme stocks lit the internet on fire back in January. The uproar caused by Robinhood temporarily halting trading on certain stocks unleashed enough of an upheaval for the big wigs at Wall Street to take notice.