Ken Griffinโ€™s Secret War on โ€˜Dumb Moneyโ€™

by Matthew Belloni from Puck News

The hedge fund billionaire is locked in a nasty behind-the-scenes legal fight over his depiction in the new GameStop movie and has hired at least two separate law firms to send Sony Pictures threatening lettersโ€”one of which I obtained.

I was in Roy Thomson Hall on Friday night here in Toronto for the world premiere of Dumb Money, the very fun Craig Gillespie film about the GameStop meme-stock frenzy of 2021. If you recall, during the height of Covid, retail investors ran up the share prices of GameStop and others, eventually inflicting a โ€œsqueezeโ€ on irate institutional investors who had shorted the stocks. As the credits rolled and the audience applauded, I wondered what Ken Griffinโ€”the Wall Street titan, billionaire proprietor of the Citadel hedge fund, and an alleged villain of the GameStop sagaโ€”thought of the film. You wonโ€™t believe this, but heโ€™s not a fan.

Like, really not a fan. Iโ€™ve since learned that Griffin is locked in a nasty behind-the-scenes legal fight with Sony Pictures over his depiction in Dumb Money, which is set to begin its theatrical roll-out on Friday. Griffin has hired at least two separate law firms and sent multiple threatening letters, one of which I obtained, and heโ€™s consulting with crisis P.R. people to push back aggressively on his depiction by actor Nick Offerman and the filmmaking team. Griffin claims the movie โ€œcrosses the line into the knowingly false and defamatory portrayal of Ken and Citadel Securities,โ€ according to the letter sent to Sony Pictures general counsel Leah Weil by well-known media attorney Tom Clare, who is joined by Quinn Emanuel partner Bill Burck.

My first thought wasโ€ฆ really? Like I said, I saw the film, and no, the depiction of Griffin certainly isnโ€™t positiveโ€”ditto the portrayal of other GameStop players, like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), whose fund lost billions shorting the troubled game retailer, and Steve Cohen (Vincent Dโ€™Onofrio), whose Point72 fund helped prop up Plotkin (and who, of course, is wearing a Mets hat in the film). But to my eye, the sharp script, written by former financial journalists Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, doesnโ€™t stretch the key facts beyond the widely circulated news headlines about the GameStop frenzy and the S.E.C. investigation, or the source material book, The Antisocial Network, by Ben Mezrich. And I know it was vetted heavily by both Sony and producer Black Bear Pictures, which hired the Jassy Vick Carolan firm.