WallStreetBets Reddit Donates Over $ 256,000 To Gorilla Conservation

• Wallstreetbets users on Reddit have donated over $ 256,000 to Gorilla Conservation.
• Over the weekend, users “embraced” the gorillas by donating to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
• Manatees, warthogs and leopards have also been adopted by members of the group who have donated to charity.
• Visit the Insider home page for more stories.

WallStreetBets, the Reddit page that has spearheaded the rise of GameStop action, has raised over $ 265,000 for a gorilla conservation fund.

A user posted on Friday that he sent a donation to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund that allowed them to ceremoniously “adopt” their own gorilla. The post was voted over 100,000 times and the idea quickly caught fire with the WallStreetBets community.

Since you can’t buy stocks over the weekend, the community decided to spend some of their new money earned on GameStop action, which hit $ 350 last week, on something positive.

Established in 1972, the fund is one of the oldest and oldest primate conservation organizations, helping to track and protect gorilla populations. Gorillas protected by the fund are considered adopted by donors supporting the organization.

The gorilla connection comes from “ape gang,” an internal nickname for the sub-reddit, referring to the idea that the group is like a bunch of monkeys pressing buttons on a keyboard to buy stocks. Users frequently send spam messages with gorilla emoticons to allude to their so-called “monkey gang”.

On Saturday and Sunday, the front page of the subreddit was inundated with adoption screenshots, with users using memes-inspired aliases such as “GameStop,” “Jim Cramer’s Tears” and “Tendie” in their adoptions. There were so many new adoptions on the subreddit that the moderators created a megathread where users could post their new animal friends.

WallStreetBets members have also found other conservation funds and adopted manatees, snow leopards, donkeys, bonobos, warthogs and many more.

Adopting your own gorilla from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund website costs between $ 60 and $ 150. For this one-time donation, you will receive a video of the gorilla in action, a certificate and an annual update on your new four-legged friend.

This seemingly random snowball of philanthropy was noticed by the fund, which added the phrase “APES TOGETHER STRONG” to their website and tweeted on Saturday that they had raised $ 77,000, before breaking $ 100,000 on Sunday.

WallStreetBets donations topped a quarter of a million dollars on Monday, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund told Insider.

—Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) March 14, 2021

Fund manager Dr Tara Stoinski created a video thanking the folks at Reddit for donating money to the fund, which was posted on the subreddit. This post was voted over 160,000 times in less than a day and received dozens of Reddit rewards that cost real money.

“The money these people have given is an investment, not only in the Fossey Fund’s mission to help people, save gorillas, but in the future of our planet,” Stoinski told Insider in a statement. “We rely on individual donors who give to us year after year because they know we can count on us to be prudent stewards of their donations, regardless of size.

WallStreetBets continues to grow in popularity, now reaching 9.5 million members who want to spend money on stocks. Thanks to a coup attempt by moderators and a federal insider trading investigation, the subreddit has continued to be the hub for traders who just want to see their “stonks” increase.