Wall Street / YMMV

Anvilicious: There is only one reason and one reason alone Gordon Gekko gives the "Zero Sum Game" and "Richest One Percent" speeches in the scene where Bud finally confronts him: Stone really seemed to feel the need to lecture the audience about the disturbing power and influence of corporate raiders like Gekko. Story-wise, there's no reason at all Gekko would suddenly lecture Bud on the subject.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: While the movie goes to great length to depict the despicability of corporate raiding, it nevertheless motivated many aspiring young men with flexible morals to get into the exchange business.
Draco in Leather Pants: Many consider Gordon Gekko's "Greed Is Good" speech to be brilliant. Incidentally, this has seriously disturbed one of the scriptwriters, Stanley Weiser.
Evil Is Cool: Gordon Gekko isn't the protagonist, he's the villain. Thanks to this trope, he's also the film's most popular character.
Harsher in Hindsight: In October 1987, stock markets around the world suffered a devastating crash, in what would come to be known as “Black Monday”. This threw a spotlight onto the greed and corruption rife amongst Wall Street traders, and a week after the film was released in December, a Gordon Gekko-like figure named Ivan Boesky was sentencing and fined for insider trading. This prompted Stone to insert a caption at the start of the film turning it into a Period Piece set before the incident.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Michael Douglas and James Spader would later join the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Douglas as Hank Pym and Spader as Ultron. Partially averted in that Pym builds Ultron in the comics, but not in the movies. The Our Founder portrait of Pym in a suit is particularly amusing.
Magnificent Bastard: Gordon Gekko is a renowned Wall Street businessman and corporate raider. Gekko frequently manipulates the stock market through rumors spread by his acolytes, on one occasion outmaneuvering one of his rivals simply to repay him for undermining one of Gekko's earlier ventures. Fostering a mentor-protege relationship with the eager stockbroker Bud Fox, Gekko instructs Fox to acquire insider information and conspire with contacts in the legal department to maximize his profits. A charismatic public speaker as well, Gekko manages to convince the shareholders of Teldar Paper to vote against the stock's restructuring by berating the company's unacceptable inefficiency in a cut-throat business, couched in terms praising The American Dream. Despite being set up by Bud Fox to lose millions after Gekko goes back on his word by planning to break up Bluestar Airlines, Gekko only ends up going to jail due to testimony from his employee Bretton James on Gekko's involvement with securities fraud. After his release years later, Gekko reinvents himself as a best-selling author before mentoring the young Wall Street insider Jake Moore, the fiance of Gekko's daughter Winnie. Gekko uses Jake to undermine Bretton James, now the COO of a major bank, ultimately leading to the latter's public disgrace and dismissal by the board of directors of Churchil Schwartz. Finally, Gekko plays Jake for a fool by promising to invest in his renewable energy project but instead confiscates the hundred million dollar trust fund set up in Winnie's name to re-establish himself as a venture capitalist based in London, then buys back his family's love so he can be a part of their life. Charming, devious, and manipulative, Gekko defined the Corrupt Corporate Executive in film.
Misaimed Fandom:
- Michael Douglas said that every time a broker said he went to Wall Street after seeing him as Gordon Gekko, he gets a little sad.
- And in the DVD, Douglas and Oliver Stone say the 2008 financial crisis was caused by those Gordon Gekko wannabes, while saying people should have gone for Bud Fox instead.
- The movie is oft-cited as an inspiration to people who went on to earn MBAs, despite the film's explicitly anti-greed message. The villain of the film is sometimes not even recognized as such by his fans—as in, they don't realize he's supposed to be the bad guy. Possibly caused by Strawman Has a Point.
- It's intriguing how many White-Collar Crime perpetrators say they LOVED Gekko and were inspired by him.
- Soviet audiences became one of these for Gekko in the last years of the Soviet Union, at least according to David Remnick's "Lenin's Tomb.". The USSR had allowed the film in for limited screenings to Communist students at the Higher Party School in Moscow, believing that Stone's vision of capitalists like Gekko aligned with their own propaganda concerning the West. However, those same students, fed up with years of stagnant growth, corruption, and economic privation in a failed command economy, actually rooted for him.
Moment of Awesome:
- "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
- Bud using every trick Gekko taught him to ruin Gekko himself.
One-Scene Wonder: Terence Stamp as Lawrence Wildman, the British financial mogul, shows up to remind Gordon that there are people in the world even he can't outsmart, bully or manipulate. Although he technically appears in two scenes.
Retroactive Recognition:
- John C. McGinley works with Bud Fox.
- And fans of Warehouse 13 might be surprised to see Artie as a corporate lawyer.
- For the comic book fans, we have Uncle Ben as Bud's father, Ultron as Roger Barnes and Hank Pym as Gordon Gekko.
- Dr. Melinda Warner of Law & Order: SVU appears as Carolyn, a secretary.
Signature Scene: Gordon’s “Greed is Good” speech.
"Stop Having Fun" Guys: Transport the venue from video games to high finance and you have a perfect analysis of Gordon Gekko. Elaborated on in the sequel, in a way. In a speech, Gekko clarifies the point made in his famous earlier speech. It amounts to a gentle denunciation of stupid greed. The villain of the film could've been any one of Gekko's many young acolytes who didn't understand that crucial distinction. This may be why, in his famous first speech, he says "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."
Strawman Has a Point:
- Gordon's "Greed is Good" speech has an (albeit often misinterpreted) point, but he doesn't really fit the strawman aspect, as the film's creators denied that they intended an Author Tract against capitalism. Kind of complicating things, is that as noted above, Gordon's actions weren't actually criminal at the time the film was set (although they were by the time it was made), although they could still be considered unethical. All in all, Gekko was definitely not intended to be a positive character, but it does not make his business ideas and practices reprehensible per se.
- Perhaps the biggest point people agree with Gordon on was his casually mentioning how all of the CEOs who were fighting his takeover had very little to lose, as they had minimal investment in the company itself - as in if the company sank, they'd have an escape route, while the average worker (or shareholder) wouldn't. Plus, he points out that the company in question (Teldar Paper) has thirty-three vice presidents who each get a $200K salary even though it had posted a $110 million loss the year before^note, and even though he's been researching the company for two months, he still doesn't know what they actually do.
- All of this being said, a line later on reveals that Gekko's solution to Teldar's problems doesn't work. Firing most of management has not turned the company around. It's possible that his two months of study were not enough for him to truly understand the workings of the company, and the loss of all of that institutional knowledge was damaging after all. This could be seen as Stone's rebuttal to Gekko's point, and those issues have indeed become relevant as executives inspired by Gekko have come to power and employed his methods.
Unintentional Period Piece: In particular, technology and the lifestyles of the wealthy seem to change more noticeably than other things do. Arguably, this is Lampshaded in the first scene of the sequel, when Gekko gets back his enormous cell phone.
Values Resonance: During Gordon’s “Greed is Good” speech he points out that the company’s management barely owns any of the stock in the company but have 33 Vice Presidents getting enormous salaries without appearing to actually do anything. Sadly this practice continues today and was seen as one of the major causes of the 2008 financial crisis.

YMMV / Wall Street

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