Dave Portnoy

Dave Portnoy is the founder of Barstool Sports, a sports and pop culture media company he built from a newspaper into a major digital media brand. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with sports largely shut down, Portnoy began publicly day-trading stocks and livestreaming the activity to his millions of social media followers, positioning himself as a brash new voice in retail investing. His declared investing philosophy — "stocks only go up" — was a joke, but his positions and commentary were followed by a large and engaged audience.

During the 2021 cryptocurrency bull market, Portnoy promoted SafeMoon and several other meme tokens to his followers across Barstool's platforms and his personal social media. SafeMoon was a high-risk speculative token whose founders were later charged by the SEC with fraud. Portnoy said he lost money on SafeMoon and positioned himself as a fellow victim of the token's decline. Critics noted that there was a meaningful difference between a private investor losing money on a speculative bet and a media figure with tens of millions of followers driving retail buying into a project — and that Portnoy's promotion contributed to the inflows regardless of his own outcome.

Portnoy has no financial credentials and has never claimed to be providing investment advice. His financial commentary was consistently framed as entertainment, and he was open about making decisions based on momentum and gut feeling rather than analysis. Whether this framing was sufficient disclosure for the audience that watched and followed him is a point of debate. Followers who lost money on tokens Portnoy promoted argue the entertainment framing did not change the real-world financial consequences of his influence.

Portnoy's case is frequently cited as an example of how large social media followings built around entertainment content can create significant financial influence with no corresponding expertise or accountability.