Hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio fears the GameStop frenzy was really about wealth inequality

• Hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio worries the GameStop saga was a product of national division and inequality.
• The Bridgewater Associates boss said the discontent will eventually spark a civil war.
• Politicians should reengineer the capitalist system to distribute wealth more evenly, Dalio said.
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Billionaire investor Ray Dalio isn't worried about the Reddit users who collectively drove GameStop's stock price to stratospheric levels last week, or the short-selling hedge funds that were squeezed as a result.

His real fear is that the GameStop saga was a symptom of broader inequality and division in America, he said on the Axios Re:Cap podcast this week. He pointed out gaps in wealth, values, and political views in the US are at their widest in more than 120 years.

"That's the big thing," he said, whereas short squeezes are "just part of the game."

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"The system doesn't work for most people, and so it needs to be reengineered, otherwise we're gonna have a civil war," he added.

The founder and co-chief of Bridgewater Associates - the world's largest hedge fund with over $150 billion in assets - celebrated upstarts disrupting the establishment as key to America's growth and prosperity.

"I can relate to these guys," he said. "I would have been there with them, doing the same thing."

However, he questioned whether the goal of the clash was to harm others. "Do we really want to kill each other?" he asked. "That's what worries me."

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On the other hand, Dalio downplayed the scale of the battle. He pointed out that "real big money" - such as Bridgewater or BlackRock - wasn't involved, as far as he knows.

The hedge-fund billionaire finished with a call for policymakers to grapple with the root causes of the GameStop squeeze. He reeled off several questions they should be asking themselves.

"How should wealth be distributed, why doesn't capitalism achieve the goal of being good for most people, and how do you engineer it that way while increasing productivity and its efficiency?" he asked.