I am going to make a wild guess and say that you have no training in economics and no experience in finance or investments. Which is okay, since there are much better things in life. I also don't think you are a historian. Not a lawyer either. Investors, big and small, lost a ton of money investing in these companies after their businesses began to fail for reasons which may have just been bad luck. A short seller cannot drive a business into bankruptcy -- it has to get there all on its own. These particular short sellers did not realize that someone would be smart enough to round up a bunch of lemmings and give them a map to a cliff. The way this story ends is that a lot of small investors (your "outsiders") are going to lose a ton of money through ignorance and the new story will be how banks and regulators did not protect them when they bought a bunch of GameStop shares at ridiculous prices. They will then find out that the real manipulators were their buddies on the message board who got them into this. By the way, this happens every day.