Eric Jackson knows when he started it all.
“7/14 at 2 p.m. Eastern,” he says. “I started it with that Tweet.”
Opendoor, the largest and one of the only remaining iBuyers, was facing the threat of having its stock removed from the NASDAQ after it withered down to a low point of 51 cents per share on June 25.
The company — the nation’s largest remaining iBuyer — was burning through cash, hemorrhaging employees and facing an uncertain future unless things turned around.
If shares didn’t climb above $1 by November, or if shareholders rejected a stock manipulation plan known as a reverse stock split, Opendoor would see its stock removed from the index in November.
Now was the time to buy shares in the company, Jackson — founder of EMJ Capital — announced to his audience of tens of thousands of people on the social media platform X. His rallying the troops via X on July 14 would, by his own account, spark what would become a sensational rise in the value of Opendoor’s stock and lead to around 2 billion transactions of Opendoor stock in a single day.
The frenzy of new retail investors backing Opendoor with their money has thrust the company under a microscope and intensified pressure for the iBuyer to shift into something that can reliably turn a profit.
Jackson said his investment firm’s AI modeling software flagged Opendoor’s stock as potentially undervalued, and he announced that he had taken a position in the company.
Over the ensuing weeks after Jackson’s first tweets, Opendoor’s stock ultimately soared nearly 200 percent, reaching a high of $3.21 per share and staying well above the $1 threshold. The stock was so volatile on July 21 that the Nasdaq temporarily halted trading.
As a result of the huge influx in new retail investors buying shares in the company for the first time, Opendoor canceled its scheduled vote on the reverse stock split.
Over the last month, my X impressions have exploded talking about $BTQQF $IREN and $CIFR because everyone is looking for the next $CVNA.
We think we just found another.@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years.…— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) July 14, 2025
Jackson has kept an intense focus on the company, and during an exclusive interview with Inman on Monday, Jackson turned his focus squarely onto Opendoor CEO Carrie Wheeler.
Eric Jackson | Co-founder of EMJ Capital
“The biggest question in my mind is Carrie,” Jackson said.
Jackson is keeping up pressure and awareness on what he says is an opportunity to make Opendoor the real estate platform of the future, a company that could be valued 100 times higher than it is today.
To reach that potential, Jackson said, he wants to see changes on the leadership team and on the board of directors — and he specifically wants Wheeler out.
“That’s not to say they don’t have great people there,” Jackson said. “They have some great people and some not so great people that need to be replaced.”
“You’ve got a CEO who never does interviews, sells stock constantly and never buys,” Jackson said.
Jackson has said he wants to be appointed to the board of directors within less than two weeks, or he’ll consider selling his shares and moving on. He’s also calling for other past employees from the company to return to it and help try to revive it.
“We’ve gotta harness this energy,” Jackson said. “I sense no sense of the same kind of level of urgency from the inside of the company.”
Jackson told Inman that Wheeler has largely been absent from public view in the time since she was named CEO in December 2022, citing a dearth of media appearances.
Opendoor declined Inman’s request to interview Wheeler. Instead, a spokesperson from the company sent a statement that said the company was “grateful for the increased and broadened interest in Opendoor’s mission to transform the residential real estate industry.”
“At this dynamic time in the housing market, we are focused on executing our strategy and giving consumers and agents more choice and control in the home selling process,” the spokesperson said.
“Last week, we announced a major strategic evolution with the launch of new products to build deeper relationships with agents and offer consumers more flexible options for real estate transactions. These new offerings will continue to build on our momentum as we expand our position as the residential real estate platform of the future.”
During an earnings call last week, Wheeler highlighted changes to add new streams of revenue in what she called a “significant evolution” for the company.
“We are now making the most important strategic shift in our history,” Wheeler said, “moving from a single product to a distributed platform with multiple offerings delivered through agents.”
What is Opendoor?
Opendoor is one of the few remaining large-scale institutional homebuyers, or iBuyers.
At its peak, the company was buying and selling thousands of homes per quarter, offering homeowners quick and easy cash offers and the flexibility to move to a new home without having to first fix and sell their existing homes.
The company competed with others, perhaps most notably Zillow, that spent billions of dollars scaling into behemoths that were feared by many in the real estate industry.
Then the cracks started to emerge.
After losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the venture, Zillow abruptly shut down its iBuyer segment in November 2021. Redfin followed suit a year later. Then came Anywhere Real Estate.
Opendoor and Offerpad outlasted them all, but not without their own financial turmoil.
Opendoor has posted a profit in just two of the 19 quarters since it went public in December 2020. In that time, it has reported losing a net total of $2.88 billion, including one quarter near the peak of the COVID housing market when it posted a net loss of $928 million.
Offerpad, Opendoor’s largest remaining competitor, has seen its cash shrink to just $22.7 million, leaving it with two to three quarters of cash remaining unless it slows cash burn or becomes profitable as it operates on a much more regional scale.
Offerpad was also in danger of being delisted after its market capitalization dropped below $50 million in April. The company is now on an 18-month “cure period” after submitting a business plan to get back into compliance in July.
Meanwhile, Opendoor’s cash and cash equivalents have fallen 66 percent from its peak in early 2022, when it was using some of its $2.3 billion to ramp up its homebuying efforts amid a red-hot market.
Both companies sought to shed expenses, undergoing multiple reductions in staff and looking to shift away from the capital-intensive business of buying and reselling homes into more asset-light revenue-generating models.
With trouble in the stock market and consistent quarterly losses, both companies appeared destined to fade toward an uncertain future.
Until mid-July.
The rally continues
Since his initial posts spotlighting Opendoor last month, Jackson has continued to call for past employees and investors to return to the company.
Steve Jennings/Getty Images
Keith Rabois, who co-founded the company, has expressed interest in the issue and has shared posts that are intended to ramp up pressure on the existing board and leadership team.
Rabois has chimed in to say that artificial intelligence would help Opendoor grow. As for Wheeler as CEO, he wrote on X, “anyone off the street would perform better” in the position.
In response to a follower who asked Rabois how Wheeler became CEO, Rabois wrote: “Stupid board. Not hindsight — the day this happened I informed every board member that I would never work with any of them again.”
i would add Eric to the board within 10 days or it will be nearly impossible to save the stock.
— Keith Rabois (@rabois) August 10, 2025
Cristin Culver, who ran Opendoor’s communications strategy during its early days before leaving in May 2020, said the company was struggling from its current communications strategy.
“They haven’t done enough, I think, by conventional standards,” Culver told Inman. “Now you’re seeing it really show up with the fact that retail investors had higher expectations on that front. It’s kind of a code red communications problem at the current moment.”
But not all hope is lost, Culver added.
“I believe it can be fixed,” she said. “Carrie has not done a lot of PR and media. And that’s I think a cornerstone of this problem.”
Jackson put it another way.
“It’s one thing though if Carrie thinks it’s OK to not do any media for 2.5 years. But I think it’s totally corporate governance malpractice,” he said. “There’s like six to seven people on this board. Nobody has said a thing for 2.5 years while the stock is melting down to 55 cents? How do you do that? Why should you keep your job?”
“I believe in this company. I want to see this 100X, and I think it can 100X even with a mediocre CEO,” Jackson said. “I don’t think they have a mediocre CEO right now. She needs to go.”
Email Taylor Anderson