Citron Capital and Melvin Capital, Wall Street short sellers that have recently found themselves in conflict with a Reddit investing community over video game retailer GameStop, have abandoned their short positions after having lost billions of dollars, according to Bloomberg.

The two firms, plus other major short sellers, have for the past week or so been effectively at war with Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community, which describes itself as "4Chan with a Bloomberg terminal." Short sellers, seeing the retailer's heavy reliance on physical game media sales in an age where most people stream or download, plus the fact that most of its stores are in shopping malls, began betting that GameStop's stock price would fall. The Reddit investors, composed almost entirely of day traders using apps such as Robinhood, pushed back by buying up options by the boatload. The combined effort of thousands of users managed to drive the share price up 800 percent over less than a month, leading the short sellers (who only make money when the share price goes down) to lose billions of dollars.

While, traditionally, investors have traded stock, either alone or in a group, to make money, the overriding motivation behind the Reddit community's actions seems to be spite, with just a touch of class warfare. While some users have made fortunes on the trades, more just were happy to see short sellers suffer and were willing to pay to make it happen. One user, for instance, said, “I don’t feel bad at all taking money from these rich greedy hedge fund managers," while another said, “I’m an old millennial. I’m tired of getting screwed by the globalist elites. This isn’t left or right republican or Democrat. It’s the 1% versus everyone else.” The forum is filled with literally hundreds of similar comments. In this respect, Reddit users have weaponized trades less to help themselves than to hurt their enemies.

In abandoning its short position, Citron Capital said it took a 100 percent loss on all GameStop bets; Melvin Capital, meanwhile, has lost 30 percent of its value since the beginning of this year and has needed to be bailed out by Hedge fund titans Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen.