After Opendoor’s stock experienced a remarkable surge in late July, new investors anxiously awaited the company’s earnings announcement on Aug. 5.
Their expectations landed with a thud. The earnings call was received poorly, and the iBuyer’s stock fell 22 percent the following day.
But the social media reactions to the company reporting a net loss of $29 million appeared less focused on the bottom line, and more on CEO Carrie Wheeler.
“They hit it out of the park with the trailing quarter,” said Eric Jackson, an investor with EMJ Capital who has taken credit for triggering the July stock run with a post on the social media platform X.
“But the communication on the earnings call from the CEO and the CFO was really awful,” he said in an interview this week with Yahoo Finance. “They were both anxiety-ridden, they seemed to show no confidence in the business.”
“I think she’s gotta go,” he said of Wheeler.
In the following days, the stock continued to flatline, albeit around $1.90, well above the 51 cents it was trading for as of late June.
For its part, Opendoor said in a statement it was “grateful for the increased and broadened interest in Opendoor’s mission to transform the residential real estate industry.”
Where does Opendoor go from here?
Opendoor has been in the process of a long, painful transition after falling from the iBuyer wave. Since going public in December 2020, the company lost roughly $2.8 billion as of earlier this year and only turned a profit twice. The firm has also made headlines for executing layoffs each quarter for the last two years, and a near-miss of a stock delisting.
Wheeler has been at the helm for the brunt of these losses after replacing Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu as CEO in 2022. She had served as CFO for the prior two years. Before joining Opendoor, Wheeler worked at private equity firm TPG Global.
It’s not just Wheeler’s handling of the losses that has earned her flak from online commenters, but her apparent hesitance to embrace the attention from retail investors and seize on other technological opportunities, like artificial intelligence.
She told Bloomberg earlier this month the stock rally by the rush of retail investors “wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025,” but that the company was looking to “harvest this moment.”
Jackson posted that the comment “really offended” him after the rush of attention buoyed the firm, and scores of commenters chimed in to agree. “There’s something fundamentally off” about her lack of acknowledgement for retail investors, wrote another. One said “it’s because she’s private equity,” referring to her track record at the asset manager giant.
Wheeler has tried to right her responses head-on, opening up an X account and making her first post on Aug. 8 where she wrote that she was “deeply thankful for every new shareholder who believes in what we’re building.”
The July stock rush set off by Jackson was revived this week when Anthony Pompliano, an investor and podcaster with a large following, announced this week he had taken a position in Opendoor. The stock rallied over 23 percent to end the day trading at $2.39.
Wheeler has tried to seize on the renewed interest, accepting an interview invitation from Pompliano in a public reply to his post on X.
The wild stock swings show the company’s opportunity lies not just in its fundamental strategy, but also in the whims of investor sentiment and social media posts.
But Opendoor remains hamstrung by high mortgage rates and wide bid-ask spreads. The company is projecting to acquire 1,200 homes in the third quarter, down from 3,504 homes in the third quarter of last year.
On X, Pompliano said his investment was driven by a belief that forthcoming rate cuts “should be a tailwind for a business that benefits from housing transaction volume.”
Meanwhile, the tension between putting forward a long-term vision for Opendoor and appeasing retail investors, whose attention allowed the company to stave off a proposed stock split to avoid delisting, remains.
Wheeler’s back-and-forth with Pompliano, for example, left Jackson unimpressed.
“Notice that Carrie required Anthony to DM her. Not the other way around,” he wrote on X. “She’s so busy writing blog posts and shooting fancy videos about $OPEN to be able to DM him. (Has she ever sent a DM before? Did “her people” tell her what that was?).”
“You can’t make this up,” he added.
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