Wall Street is one of my all time favorite movies! I even had Gordon's speech there memorized and worked it into a presentation in a college Logic & Rhetoric class but it wasn't until watching the movie for the 15th or so time when Oliver Stone's real message sunk in that Greed.. isn't good.
Ironically, he made Gordon Gekko such a memorable character that many people walked away from the film with the exact opposite feelings he was trying to conjure up.
“A lot of people who are now in their middle ages have said to me, ‘I got into this business partly because I saw your movie and it made me want to go to Wall Street,'” Stone confessed. “They’d say, ‘I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer anymore. I wanted to make some money.’ I’d say, ‘Didn’t you get the point? That Gekko was not a good guy.’ And they’d [respond], ‘Yeah but, it’s still exciting… I figure I don’t have to be a Gekko to do it, I can figure out a way to make money honestly.'”