I reckon much of us are misinformed on this story behind GME. The mainstream media always creates exciting storyboards for more clicks hehe. The real story is this pump was started by Michael Burry. It only begun a domino effect from there.
Burry's hedge fund Scion Asset Management spent nearly $15 million to purchase 5.3% of ailing video game retailer GameStop at between $2 and $4.2 a share. According to Forbes, Burry's play was to convince GameStop to use its cash to buy back stock – thereby retiring about half of its shares outstanding.
Burry, who was dramatized by Christian Bale in "The Big Short", called for GameStop to exhaust its $300 million buyback authorization in a sharply worded letter to its board of directors. The company's entire market cap at the time of his letter was just $300 million. Burry's play reportedly sparked one of the most out-of-control trades in financial history, resulting in billions of dollars in paper profits for some investors – including quite a few amateur speculators. In turn, this caused billions in losses for some of the world's biggest hedge funds.
That is really not the point here, that is really not the reason why any of this is happening neither. People assume this is the reason but we are talking about people who have been holding this for years now, there are quite literally people who have hold it for over a year, nearly a year and a half right now, all from reddit. This was all stemmed from r/wallstreetbets and nothing more, not scion, not burry, nothing else and you can't just put all the credit on some hedge fund manager when the whole thing started because we were against the hedge funds to begin with.
If he did a good trade at the time good for him, having a good trade before this started doesn't mean that he was the one that started it. That wording of "burry's play reportedly sparked one of..." part, NO it wasn't burry's play and it wasn't because of him, it was u/deepfuckingvalue and that's it.