College Student Uses GameStop Stock Earnings to Buy Nintendo Switches for Children’s Hospital

A 20-year-old student who joined the wave of amateur investors who bought shares in Gamestop managed to win big in last week’s run on the retailers’s stock. However, he’s now using his massive gains for good by making a gracious donation to a children’s hospital.

Hunter Kahn, a mechanical engineering student at Cornell University in New York, surfed the wave of speculation driven by the “Wall Street Bets” Reddit forum until last Wednesday, when he cashed out and earned a cool $30,000. He then decided that some charitable giving was in order, so he bought six Nintendo Switch consoles and a clutch of games to donate to the Children’s Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis.

In the past couple weeks alone, GameStop shares have increased by leaps and bounds thanks to the actions of a rag-tag group of investors on Reddit, who bought the stock largely in hopes to slam short sellers and hedge funds who were betting on the stock sinking.

Kahn, who hails from Stillwater, Minnesota, noted that the whole point of first-time investors rallying around GameStop was to stick it to Wall Street – and not become the sort of fat cats who make their living at others’ expense.

“As a beneficiary of the recent events on Wall Street I think it is important that myself and others pay forward our good fortune,” wrote Kahn in a post to his Instagram that announced the donation.

“These events have highlighted a lot of corruption and with this transfer of power it is important that we don’t become men in suits ourselves.”

While Kahn’s foray into investing has proved massively successful so far, the young engineering student doesn’t have aspirations to work on Wall Street or in finance. Instead, he hopes to one day construct spaceships for Elon Musk.

Nintendo of America has recently partnered up with nonprofit organization the Starlight Children’s Foundation to help bring a little bit of happiness to seriously ill children and their families who are dealing with extended hospital stays.

Starlight and the Seattle-based subsidiary of the Japanese gaming giant debuted the first hospital gaming station in December 2019 at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, before announcing that it would roll out more stations to hospitals across the United States.

“The gaming stations are important distraction tools that normalize the health care environment and help kids through difficult experiences,” Julie Hertzog, child life supervisor at Mary Bridge, said in a statement. “They provide choices for kids, motivate them, and give them the opportunity to have fun when it is needed most.”

Since then, Starlight and Nintendo have delivered over 7,200 gaming stations to over 800 hospitals and healthcare facilities, according to a press release.

For Kahn, the kind act of making such a generous donation to the hospital in his home region was extremely gratifying. Fans and fellow Redditors are now calling him “the real Robinhood.”

“It was a better feeling than waking up in the morning and seeing that [GameStop’s stock price] was on the moon,” said Kahn. “I love video games. I know it would be terrible being a kid in a hospital with like no joy helping them through.”

“A lot of people are saying that this is somewhat like a transfer of power, but if the money’s going from here just to the other side, there’s no difference if we just are acting the same way as the people that we’re criticizing.”