Sure, plenty of people do. But those arent the ones making daily /r/Superstonk posts with their crazy-board yarn lines connecting some CNBC article they found from 3 years ago to a cryptic new tweet from an anonymous "insider" about the impending squeeze. A ton of people who knew absolutely nothing about investing lost everything over this, and it's sad to see it play out.
My grandmother taught home economics for her whole career including personal finance and I assure you she doesn’t know what a short squeeze is. My grandfather probably didn’t pay a bill or make a budget his entire life, but his heirs are still getting payouts from his benefits.
For that matter most of the tech workers I’ve worked with don’t understand how many of their benefits work either (e.g rsu, HSA, backdoor Roth’s, etc). How many startups out there are pitching options as major components of their compensation without even giving their employees the information needed to price them?
I think there is a ton of good about moving away from patriarchal relationships between employee benefits and employment, but it’s not at all surprising that it’s had the repercussion that people unprepared for it have been dumped in the deep end. And that it’s deeper than ever and they are drowning.
So, apparently a lot of the people who are still holding onto the stock have engaged in full-on apocalyptic cult insanity. They're under the delusion that the "Mother of All Short Squeezes" hasn't happened yet, and that when it will happen, it will be an absolute financial calamity, as literally all Gamestop stock will be held by "true" holders [1], who can therefore extort any price from the short sellers desperate to buy the stock back to cover the short squeeze, causing the price to hit millions of dollars per share, allowing the true holders comfortable retirement as billionaires.
It really is an apocalyptic cult mindset, people seeing themselves as the sufferers who will receive redemption in the imminent apocalypse as their (currently more successful foes) receive absolute punishment at the same time. Although even compared to most apocalyptic prophecies, this one is particularly far-fetched: the means of deliverance is extremely vague, with the closest hint of an idea is essentially that the Big Bad who is currently oppressing them will somehow turn around and reward them handsomely for their perseverance (usually stated with some amount of cognitive dissonance--you get the sense that the adherents don't really believe this, but they need to justify deliverance somehow and there's no better option than this).
[1] There's a belief that most of the shares are fake.
The general framework is always the same, it's just the underlying scenario that changes. Generally you have some group of people for whom a question is a matter of survival (in this case financially) that do what humans do when there is no hope: they continue to hope. It necessitates a detachment from reality to keep their worldview consistent.
That very much isn't the case for the vast majority of people suckered into this, though. And they're not looking to survive, they're looking to become rulers in a new world order (the current theory is that if they directly register their shares, then it will become clear that hedge funds have made up a lot of shares(??) and that hedge funds/the federal reserve/the government(?????) will be forced to buy their shares for millions of dollars apiece, for some reason).
To be clear, the GameStop thing wasn't always like this; their 'MOAS' concept started as just them slightly misunderstanding what a naked short was. But it has really gone some weird places.
I learned of NESARA through Will Sommer's TRUST THE PLAN, which is about qanon. The MOASS, NESARA, and qanon conspiracy theories all share some interesting characteristics, like there's something necessary for a conspiracy theory to start resembling the distributed cataclysm-utopia cults we're discussing
I thought the GME/Robinhood/Citadel conspiracy theory was, you know, conspiracy-theoretic. But that's not even scratching the surface of how weird this gets.