Billing itself the "first internet community", the site hosts 30 million message posts made by 90,000 registered users.

[5] In the early 2000s, during the crash of the dot-com bubble, Silicon Investor started losing web-traffic to free messaging boards such as RagingBull.com and Yahoo's YHOO Finance.

[7] The following year, it fired Silicon Investor's main moderator and investment guru Bob Zumbrunnen, whom The Wall Street Journal described as a cross between a “bouncer, diplomat, and traffic cop”.

[12] Initially, fellow Silicon Investor members were skeptical that a medical professional knew anything about the stock market.

He was prominently featured in The New York Times bestseller, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.

In 2000, Loeb was named as a defendant in a ‘cybersmear’ suit for allegedly running a smear campaign on on-line messaging boards and forums, including Silicon Investor.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Elgindy bribed an FBI agent to obtain classified information in order to manipulate stocks.

[18] Yun Soo Oh Park is a South Korean immigrant who ran a chain of burrito restaurants in Manhattan.

Tokyo Joe had written thousands of posts giving investment advice and advertising stock picks.

[23] 2TheMart.com's lawyers issued a subpoena requesting that InfoSpace, then Silicon Investor's owner, reveal the users’ identities.

In 2001, a Silicon Investor member who used the pseudonym NoGuano enlisted the help of the ACLU and the Electronic Freedom Foundation to try and quash the subpoena.

In April 2001, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly sided with the Silicon Investor member and ruled that Internet users had a First Amendment right to remain anonymous.

[24] The Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the verdict as “a clear message that the court will not tolerate lawsuits designed to chill online speech.”[24] Silicon Investor is divided into 3 ‘top level’ discussion Internet forums: StockTalk, Politics, and Pastimes.