At a moment when millions of Americans struggle to buy homes, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s $16 trillion mortgage empire, is led by Bill Pulte. Yet Pulte’s rise brings an astonishing twist: a man famed as a social-media “meme-stock” speculator is now in charge of America’s housing finance. Pulte, grandson of the PulteGroup homebuilding founder, was only confirmed as FHFA Director in March 2025. A Washington Post report even noted that within weeks, he fired dozens of government housing officials, slashing the FHFA’s workforce by roughly 25 percent.
How did a private equity scion and online celebrity end up entrusted with such a crucial public role, and should he be? Of all the questions raised by Pulte’s tenure, one looms largest: can a man so entwined in a murky meme-stock frenzy be trusted to protect ordinary homeowners?
Bill Pulte is hardly a veteran of housing policy. He is the scion of an American housing dynasty. His grandfather, William J. Pulte, founded PulteGroup and made it one of the nation’s largest homebuilders. Bill Pulte himself did serve on the family firm’s board from 2016–2020 and remains a significant shareholder. But he quit the family business to run his investment firm, Pulte Capital, and a family office. He also cultivated a high-profile online persona, ‘Twitter Philanthropy,’ handing out over $1 million to random followers on social media. Critics derided these giveaways as cheap stunts; even a Pulte family foundation publicly distanced itself from Bill’s antics. He claimed as a student he started a helicopter charter company and bragged of making big stock bets at an early age. More recently, Pulte has used Twitter and podcasts to push investments in “meme” stocks, shares of distressed companies that online groups try to pump for profit. As the American Prospect noted, he “left [the family homebuilding firm] behind to run a private equity firm and became renowned as a meme-stock impresario, hyping companies like GameStop or Bed Bath & Beyond to retail investors.”
Behind the scenes, Pulte’s record is anything but genteel. He’s a committed Trump loyalist: the Campaign Legal Center filed a federal complaint alleging that “William Pulte” (widely understood to be Bill Pulte) secretly funneled $500,000 into a Trump super-PAC via a shell LLC. In other words, he is accused of breaking campaign-finance laws to bankroll partisan politics. On Twitter, he was blunt and combative; a Rolling Stone exposé (cited by watchdogs) found him “engaged in petty fights and childish name-calling” online. He routinely traded insults with critics and even other public figures, calling people “foreign freak[s] and loser[s].” These tweets were no minor lapse; one report found Pulte deleted over 24,000 posts from his account in November 2024, apparently to hide this very past. In short, Pulte cultivated an online image part crusader, part provocateur, hardly the typical resume for a top regulator.
Nevertheless, Pulte was touted as FHFA Director by the mortgage industry. His nomination was “celebrated” by lending and housing groups. During confirmation hearings, Pulte, a first-time public servant, outlined grand plans, speaking of ultimately ending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s 17-year conservatorship and privatizing them. President Trump had surprised everyone by announcing he would “take public” the two government-controlled mortgage giants. Pulte quickly seized on this, telling policymakers he was “exploring ways to sell shares while keeping the companies under government authority.” To some Republicans eager to cash in on Fannie/Freddie stock, that sounded good. But even Politico reporters described the strategy as “baffling” and contradictory. Why inject uncertainty by shuffling shareholders when the system is supposed to lend stability to homeowners?
Never mind that. Now, back to the real drama: Bed Bath & Beyond stock. For most readers, Bed Bath & Beyond (ticker: BBBY) evokes an image of a home goods retailer on the brink of bankruptcy, hardly something to excite regulators. However, in 2022, it evolved into something else: a Bitcoin-style cult. In August 2022, a bizarre sequence of events unfolded. The Atlantic documented it: BBBY was a “struggling home-goods retailer whose underlying business is so bad” that analysts doubted its survival. Yet from late July to mid-August, its shares soared from about $5 to nearly $30, a 500% jump in weeks, with zero real news to justify it. WallStreetBets-style traders took notice: the heavily shorted stock was being squeezed purely by retail enthusiasm. The Forum chatter pumped it: each uptick led more day traders to pile in, breathing false life into a dying company. “The frenzy faded,” Atlantic wrote, “but then…interest improbably returned, and for no company was that more true than Bed Bath & Beyond.” This was nothing more than a modern-day pump-and-dump driven by online crowd psychology (one analyst compared it to early 20th-century stock pools rigging prices together).
When the dust settled, the outcome was as predictable as it could be. Big-money investor Ryan Cohen (GameStop’s co-founder) had quietly bought roughly $120–$121 million of BBBY stock earlier in 2022, details confirmed by filings. His ownership sent the stock surging on the hope he’d turn the company around (investors had ousted BBBY’s CEO to placate Cohen). But in mid-August, he abruptly dumped his entire 9.8% stake. Reuters reported that Cohen’s sale “flooded social media platforms” with fury, retail investors who “had followed his lead on Bed Bath only to see him abruptly cash out.” Cohen locked in roughly $55–60 million in profit, while many small investors, holding high-priced shares, were left reeling. One day Cohen’s exit news broke, Atlantic observed, it “broke the fever and sent the stock tumbling” by two-thirds. Bed Bath & Beyond’s share price collapsed back under $10, and “lots of the retail investors who bought on the way up have lost a ton of money." In short, ordinary people got crushed.
Enter Bill Pulte. In the middle of this chaos, Pulte was paying attention and jumping in to fan the flame. Rolling Stone (via investigative reports) later revealed that Pulte frequently tweeted about Ryan Cohen and $BBBY, essentially telling his thousands of followers to watch Cohen’s every move. According to that account, Pulte even seemed to position himself as an “oracle” for the crowd: his followers were led to believe he was relaying secret messages from Cohen to the Bed Bath faithful. Crucially, Pulte’s posts came after the real damage was done after Cohen had already loaded up on shares and shortly before he sold them all. In effect, Pulte was stoking a now-overhyped rally. His Twitter timeline became a signal flasher, urging retail investors to hold or even buy more BBBY stock just as it was reaching its peak.
This was not harmless. By all indications, Pulte’s tweets helped feed the frenzy. A U.S. media report notes that “Pulte’s engagement with the $BBBY investor community occurred after the stock plummeted but while it could still be traded.” In other words, he was pouring fuel on a dying fire. Many of the small investors who heeded him lost heavily. Think about it: these were everyday Americans, some lured from GameStop success or conspiracy forums, taking Pulte’s word. Only later did the flames die. Eventually, Pulte tried to distance himself: his deletion of tens of thousands of tweets in late 2024 coincided with media scrutiny of exactly this “meme-stock” episode.
To be clear, it’s unclear whether Pulte personally pocketed gains from Bed Bath & Beyond trades. But it hardly matters: his actions resemble a classic pump-and-dump play. In online chats, disgruntled investors noted that after Pulte got bored, he quietly moved on, leaving others stuck. He touted transparency for BBBY shareholders on cable news around January 2024, even as many such shareholders had already been wiped out. By then, BBBY was defunct (the company later went bankrupt in 2023). However, Pulte was still publicly extolling the cause as a populist crusade. (That Fox Business clip, headlined “My focus is to get transparency from Bed, Bath & Beyond: Bill Pulte,” aired months after the stock had collapsed, a tone-deaf nod to his earlier hype.)
His bid to wear the hero’s cape was transparent. He even tried other platforms, for example, appearing on podcasts (like “The PPSeeds Show”) and Reddit threads where meme-stock advocates gathered. A recent industry report noted that “Pulte was an active social media user” who “previously engaged with retail investors during the 2021 ‘meme stock’ events involving companies like GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond.” That report cited Rolling Stone’s observation that Pulte deleted over 24,000 posts to scrub this fact. In short, there’s evidence Pulte deliberately immersed himself in the Bed Bath & Beyond cult movement, entangling his brand with their fortunes, then quietly tried to wipe it away when the heat got too high.
Such conduct is, at best, ethically dubious. Advocating a stock while knowing those bets will likely crash borders on market manipulation. Indeed, meme-stock advocates themselves have accused figures like Pulte of running a scam. Even if Pulte’s friends say he “lost too” on BBBY, that claim rings hollow; the timeline suggests he pushed the bubble and then diluted responsibility by retreating. What’s not debatable is the result: ordinary investors, the very people Pulte claimed to champion, were left poorer because he steered them wrongly.
Yet today, that same man is entrusted with overseeing housing finance for all Americans. The FHFA’s mission is to maintain safe and stable mortgage markets, facilitate access to credit, protect borrowers, and safeguard taxpayers. Its Director holds billions of homeowners’ dreams in his hands. So ask yourself: would someone who treated everyday people as pawns in a risky stock frenzy deserve such power? The contrast could not be starker. With the FHFA under Pulte, policies have already shifted; he’s signaling rapid privatization of Fannie and Freddie, plans long championed by hedge-fund speculators, not Main Street. Meanwhile, Pulte has slashed the agency’s staff and purged scores of Fannie Mae employees, 175 federal workers were suddenly sent packing, citing “unethical conduct” as the excuse. In practice, this appears to be a blitz of regulatory change rather than cautious guardianship of the housing market.
It gets worse. Recall that Pulte is also accused of secretly skirting finance laws in politics. When the Campaign Legal Center filed its complaint, they alleged Pulte orchestrated a classic “straw donor” scheme, funneling half a million dollars to Trump’s PAC via an LLC he controlled. Those are allegations. Pulte was never prosecuted, but they hang over his reputation. If true, they suggest a willingness to conceal the truth and break the rules. In context, his meme-stock skullduggery appears to be a pattern of murky dealings: hype retail-trader mobs with insider cues, conceal the records afterward and funnel secret cash to politicians. Even Pulte’s once-cordial relations with his own family turned icy; family members publicly stressed they were separate from his Twitter stunts.
Yet Congress shrugged aside these red flags. In March 2025, he squeaked through Senate confirmation by only a 56–4 vote. Representatives from both parties have since questioned his stewardship. Utah Senator Mike Lee asked at his confirmation hearing how Pulte could be fit to stabilize housing if he’d been destabilizing small investors. But such concerns have been drowned by politics. Now, under Pulte’s watch, housing finance is being reimagined. While he tweets surveys about freeing mortgage giants, the wreckage of Bed Bath & Beyond still lies on investors’ plates.
Any objective view finds Pulte’s record deeply troubling. His online persona, at once mercurial and calculated, has peddled conspiracy-laced financial hype to cult-like followings. He’s made a virtue of tearing down norms: deregulating homebuilding, fundraising by any means, literally leaving half of an FHFA staff unemployed overnight. At the same time, he’s poised to tap the secondary mortgage market in novel ways, potentially endangering borrowers’ security. It is morally jarring that the man who stoked a hashtagged rally on a dying retailer’s stock is now poised to steer the credit for families across America.
Ultimately, the burden of proof should lie with Pulte. He has stated that every move will be aimed at strengthening credit access and preserving housing. But his opponents point out a stark fact: someone who treated stock speculators as a personal pet project is unlikely to turn around and treat low-income renters and first-time homebuyers with equal deference. If this fiasco has any lesson, it’s that “too big to fail” exists not just in banks but in trust. Bill Pulte’s bed-and-beyond-stock escapade shows a willingness to gamble with others’ money for a thrill. Should such a man now wield the nation’s housing policy? The American people deserve a regulator they can trust, not an online stock hustler who blindsided them once.
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