The whole craziness with GameStop over the past week or so has been well documented, by people much smarter than I am, so I won’t get into that.
The Mets get dragged into this drama, because why not, since their new billionaire owner owns a hedge fund. To be clear, not the hedge fund involved with the drama surrounding GameStop, AMC, Reddit, and even Robinhood. He gets caught up in Twitter drama with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
Let me start by saying, I really like Dave Portnoy. He’s hilarious, calls it like it is, and has done amazing things to help small businesses recently. All around, really good dude.
Him and Steve Cohen got into a back and forth Twitter war of the GameStop drama. Up until now, Cohen’s experience on Twitter has been nothing but rainbows and sunshine. But the Twitterverse showed its true colors pretty quick. Things turned vicious when other Twitter users started ganging up on Cohen, name-calling, personal attacks, and threatening with family.
Since then, for his safety and his family’s, he’s taking a break from Twitter. If I had to guess it’ll be a few months. I don’t really blame him for taking a break because honestly, who needs that drama right now, especially if your name is Steve Cohen.
I’ll be the first to tell you Cohen is no saint. He’s done some shady things in the past. Most of us know about the SEC violations, other not so legal or illegal activities involving the stock market. He isn’t perfect, we all know this. I also don’t feel bad for a guy who is worth $14B and lost a lot of money with the recent craziness in the market.
Attacks from Portnoy were not only vicious but wrong. As we know, and even by Barstool Sports employees, Cohen was not involved in this in any way and Portnoy is just flat out wrong for attacking Cohen like this.
Not only didn’t Portnoy do his research, but the usually thicked skinned commentator also seems to be taking whatever Cohen did personally. As someone who is (or should be) focused on sports, burning bridges with one of the top organizations in baseball shouldn’t be what you are trying to do. Especially when you have no facts to back it up.
So dive into the questions; what’s wrong with Dave Portnoy? There are rumors he was involved with the Alex Rodriguez group that bid on Mets. Is he taking out his frustrations on the Mets new owner because he’s a sore loser? He also seems to have a connection to Mets old owner Jeff Wilpon. Is he upset that Cohen’s ousted his buddy?
The whole thing doesn’t really make sense. What’s probably worse about the whole situation is Portnoy hasn’t apologized to Cohen yet for leading a parade of personal attacks on him and his family.
Like I said before I like Dave Portnoy. This seems very uncharacteristic of him, and by the own people at Barstool, goes against everything that he’s against. Making baseless attacks against someone with no knowledge. There seems to be more to this feud. Maybe we’ll find out more in time.
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