If you know the name Jordan Belfort, it’s probably because Leonardo DiCaprio played him in The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s epic satire about crooked brokers who gamed the stock market in the ‘90s. (Or maybe you were one of the many he and his cronies gamed.) That film, along with The Big Short and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, have been big streamers recently, and with good reason: We’re in the midst of the GameStop-Reddit saga, in which amateur traders have been exploiting loops in the system, with possibly game-changing results.
Well, Belfort apparently isn’t going to pass this moment up. Now that the general public is thinking about stocks again, the broker-turned-motivational speaker has recorded a parody video, in which he acts out one of Wolf of Wall Street’s key scenes. About halfway through the film, DiCaprio’s Belfort has been advised to leave his firm after the FBI starts sniffing out its many underhanded deeds. But midway through what was supposed to be his big farewell speech, he announces he’s staying on. It’s a big, thrilling moment…that more or less leads to the destruction of his company and his eventual imprisonment.
So Belfort recreated the speech, for the age of this latest wave of upstarts taking on the system, inserting himself into the scene from the movie. One big difference: What the GameStop Redditers are doing doesn’t appear to be illegal. What Belfort and team did — including securities fraud and money laundering — were. But whether Belfort realizes that Scorsese was definitely not making a hagiography — it’s possibly his angriest film, mired in deep sarcasm and concluding with a disturbing reminder that too many Americans are attracted to charismatic criminals — seems to be up in the air.
You can watch the full video above.
