19m views for one of the best scenes of all time
I have some pretty strong opinions about that movie...
The actual Wolf of Wall Street, based off of Jordan Belfort, is a guy who has always been a pretty greasy, grimy scammer who is currently using his newly found fame from the movie (now that he's out of prison) to speak at events, promoting really shady financial opportunities, which have no proven success, and touting them as legitimate ways for making quick and easy profits so that he can collect huge speaking fees; with many of these "opportunities" looking a lot like pyramid, Ponzi or pump and dump schemes. He basically gets paid to promote the financial product and usually never even uses it himself.
As one might expect with a Hollywood movie, the
actual story of Jordan Belfort isn't particularly exciting or interesting beyond how clever and unique (at the time) many of his fraudulent methods were. Now, I don't know about you, but the
last person I would want to take financial advice from is an ex-con who defrauded investors out of over $200 million dollars by hyping up stocks/securities (while holding his own large positions) and then, once the price appeared to be peaking, he would sell everything, sending the price plummeting, followed by panic selling, driving the price down even further, resulting in immense losses for everyone who he conned into buying it. Let's also not forget all of the money laundering.
He also ended up pleading guilty and snitched on everyone who trusted him for an extremely light sentence of four years in Club Fed. At one of his speaking events not too long ago, since gaining his freedom, he tried hyping up the crowd by doing that same guttural humming schtick (that was shown in the video you shared) while banging on his chest. It was pretty cringeworthy.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie Wolf of Wall Street, but it glorifies a man who defrauded people out of -- in many cases -- their entire life savings, betrayed people's trust, manipulated markets, it gave him a reputation as being someone we should actually care about/someone who was a masterful trader (both completely untrue), and he is someone who should never have been allowed to participate in the world of finance again. It's the story of a terrible person who got rewarded by being paid huge sums of money so that their story could be turned into a movie, and having it retold in a way which is so far removed from what actually happened that now this asshole is a celebrity with respect from anyone who doesn't realize how the movie glorified him to the most extreme extent possible.
