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It was wild days for the three men.
One, Keith Gill, sparked what was perhaps the most spectacular stock rally in American markets history.
The other, Gabe Plotkin, lost billions of dollars as a result.
And Vlad Tenev, the head of an online broker, is said to have helped the powerful on Wall Street in the vortex and disadvantaged small investors.
They all have in common an event known as the GameStop saga in January.
They met for the first time on Thursday.
Gill, Plotkin and Tenev testified before the US House of Representatives.
They were interviewed by video for five hours and 29 minutes by the members of the finance committee.
"Grilled", as the Americans call it.
Because such congress hearings are extremely unpleasant.
They are often a political spectacle, designed to humiliate the accused and give MPs an opportunity to express themselves.
And so there were often superlatives.
The GameStop saga, some politicians said, was the greatest threat to the financial world since the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008.
The video game retailer's stock had risen from around $ 20 to $ 483 within a few days at the end of January, an increase of more than 2000 percent.
Currently the price is back below $ 50.
Hobby speculators who got on at the height of the rally lost a lot of money.
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"This is tragic," said Keith Gill now in front of Congress, "but the market movements were not triggered by my posts." Gill, 34 years old, is considered the man who started the rush.
He published his GameStop trades on Reddit and YouTube, where he is known under the name Roaring Kitty, in German "roaring kitten".
And many small investors followed suit, which drove up the price of the stock.
Keith Gill in his videotaped testimony
Source: AP
Did Gill campaign for GameStop to take advantage of soaring prices?
"This accusation is absurd," he said on Thursday.
"I thought the stocks were a good investment simply because they were undervalued." Gill sat in a red gamer chair during the congressional hearing, as he did in his YouTube videos.
But this time he wasn't wearing a colored T-shirt, but a suit and tie.
And his long hair was combed back neatly, not tied with a headband.
"What happened in January makes me humble"
For MPs, Gill embodied the central tenet of those January days: that posts and YouTube videos can move a stock dramatically, completely detached from the true value of the company.
The prices of many companies from Silicon Valley also seem too high, but at least there are expectations of future success there.
GameStop, on the other hand, a chain that relies on physical stores and is fighting for survival in the Corona crisis, hardly an analyst regards as a good bet.
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One of those who bet on GameStop's demise was Gabe Plotkin, the founder of the Melvin hedge fund.
He is now considered a loser in the trial of strength between retail and Wall Street investors.
Plotkin held so-called short positions in GameStop.
As the price continued to rise, it closed it with high losses.
The assets under management of his hedge fund reportedly shrank from $ 12.5 billion at the beginning of the year to now $ 8 billion.
"What happened in January," said Plotkin to the MPs, "makes me humble".
He used the word several times, knowing full well that the chairman of the finance committee, the Democrat Maxine Waters, is considered a fighter for America's small investors.
Waters described hedge funds in the hearing as "predatory".
In her opinion, Wall Street deliberately discriminates against amateur speculators.
This is where Vlad Tenev, the head of Robinhood, came in.
In the midst of the rally, his online broker suddenly only allowed the sale of GameStop shares, not the purchase.
It was suspected that hedge funds like Melvin had colluded with Robinhood to subdue the Reddit community.
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That would be a bitter irony.
After all, Robinhood presents itself - as the name suggests - as a friend of hobby investors.
The app waives trading fees and is easy to use.
That entices millions of people to invest, many of them young and inexperienced.
Critics complain that the platform makes buying shares seem like a game and trivializes the risks.
Has Robinhood, the hero of small investors, of all people, collaborated with Wall Street?
"The accusation is absolutely wrong," Tenev told Congress.
There were no agreements with Plotkin or other hedge fund managers.
The reason for the restrictions, explained Tenev, was an increased need for collateral due to the surge in trading volume.
Robinhood raised $ 3.4 billion from investors in just a few days during the GameStop rally to strengthen its capital position.
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How does it go from here?
The House of Representatives should schedule further meetings on the GameStop case in the coming weeks.
Laws could follow later that force online brokers like Robinhood to be more transparent or to restrict short sales of hedge funds.
But one of the saga's protagonists has a specific problem: Keith Gill, the "roaring kitten".
He is being sued by an investor who speculated on Gamestop shares.
Gill, it is alleged, is a licensed finance professional who poses as an amateur to small investors in order to induce them to buy overpriced stocks and to profit from subsequent rallies.
At least with GameStop, he actually made a profit like a Wall Street dealer: We're talking about $ 7.8 million.