Surely you understand that my use of terms like "gravity" and "Ponzi scheme" is in the mode of imagery, illustrations. If I must clarify:
Gravity: What goes up comes down. What goes up very high without a basis in reality WILL come crashing down. It is an inescapable force.
Ponzi scheme: A large base of people (many layers of them) are defrauded into jumping into an investment that is doomed to fail (refer to "gravity"). Only a few at the top of the pyramid make money. Everyone else loses big.
Hubris: OK, stupidity, ignorance, innocence, misguidedness, etc. Pick one. Hubris happens to be the most benign. Perhaps people were too excited to engage their brains. It doesn't change the reality that they did not engage their brains. So, I am calling it "hubris" to be nice. The correct term would be far harsher than that.
Ignorance: Nobody who understood what was going on would have taken that side of the trade. I knew exactly what was going on. I watched it go into the 400's and bough a bunch of puts. Laughed all the way down. Even if it kept going and reached $1K, I would have made money (refer to "gravity").
Those who pumped it up that high were not displaying great intellectual capacity, and they paid for it.
Hurt: Lost money. Lost their savings. Committed suicide. Had heart attacks. Got divorced. Lost money they could not lose.
Mathematical and analytical thinking: Yeah. I stand by that 100%. When the second derivative of the stock price with respect to time is, well, ridiculous, without an equally impressive reason to support it there is one thing we know without a shadow of a doubt: It will come down just as fast and hard (refer to "gravity") and you better be waiting for the other side to buy put options and not a part of the front side of that spike.
Like it or not stocks have to mean-revert to a reasonable mathematical calculation related to actual valuation. Sure, there are corner cases here and there, but they are few when compared to the average market P/E ratio of about 25:1. A one billion to 1 change in the P/E ratio (whatever GME was, it was ridiculous) in a few days doesn't pass physics or math.
And, yes, anyone who doesn't agree with me based on these facts should refrain from throwing money at the stock market.
EDIT:
Anyone who lost money with GME was not being intelligent when making those decisions. They can't even claim they were victims. Pick any adjective that pleases you, "intelligent" isn't one of them. The folks who understood what was going on (see "gravity") and acted accordingly are the intelligent ones.
This might not be a nice thing to be told. And yet the best lessons are sometimes learned harshly. I hope everyone who got hurt in this event is able to eventually recover and then come back to the market as thinking investors and not as part of an unthinking mob.