Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, with GameStop’s logo shining above them."

As mentioned before (see here, here and here), the standard democratization of Wall Street/little guys beat the big boys at their own game narrative never made much sense. Even viewed as zero-sum game, there were always more players at the table than just the hedge funds that went short and the traders on r/WallStreetBets. Certain hedge funds took horrendous losses in the massive short squeeze but on the other side of those trades were many investors like these two who went deep into a once and future five dollar stock when it was trading at somewhere between ten and one hundred times its likely post bubble value. Note how the second trader has not only wiped out his savings but is risking being fired by "sacrificing sleep and calling in sick to work."

 Drew Harwell writing for the Washington Post.

Evan Oosterink, a 19-year-old college student in the Netherlands, knew almost nothing about GameStop when in December he chose the company for one of his first big stock-market bets, calling it some kind of “American games shop where you can get all your games,” he said.

But his favorite Reddit forum, WallStreetBets, was increasingly obsessed with it, casting it as a way to crush billionaires, move the market and profit heavily in the process. Energized by its rising price, Oosterink said he invested another 8,000 euros last month — nearly $10,000, mostly from years of savings from his parents and some government college loans — leaving only about 30 euros in his personal account.

Had he sold last week, he could have pocketed a typical American’s annual salary. But as the stock has crumbled, he has turned to the forum for reassurance, posting a screenshot from his online-banking app showing the day’s losses, totaling about $9,000. He said he was “deep in losses but holding will prevail,” and included the emoji for a rocket and “diamond hands,” the forum’s lingo for not selling when a stock nose-dives.

“Being a part of WallStreetBets, it’s like a religion you’re devoted to,” he said on a Tuesday phone call from his parents’ home, where, in his bedroom, he has hung up a printed-out meme image featuring Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, with GameStop’s logo shining above them.

“There’s this enormous power driving WallStreetBets, this energy: ‘Hold the line. We aren’t giving in. We aren’t giving up. We are in for that ride to that moon,’ ” he said, reiterating several of the forum’s catchphrases. “That is the power that keeps everyone holding their shares.”

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Several other WallStreetBets believers said they aren’t budging, regardless of the damage. The Reddit poster Volkswagens1, who declined to give his name but said he lives in the Pacific Northwest, showed The Washington Post an image indicating roughly $400,000 in potential GameStop losses from the day but insisted he would not sell.

He said he has “been poor for too long” and works “a god awful amount of hours for a garbage company” and sees betting on popular “meme stocks” as a way to potentially strike it big.

“You can’t get good returns waiting on garbage stocks to increase. Who wants to invest in some boomer a-- SEARS or Macys stock, just to watch it tank,” he said in a conversation on Reddit with The Post.

He said he’s poured most of his saving and checking accounts into the stocks and spent the last week “doing as much research as possible,” including sacrificing sleep and calling in sick to work, to make sure he was staying on top of the market’s moves.

“I’m slightly agitated, but in the end, its just a gamble and Im willing to risk it all,” he wrote. “Ill have diamond hands until the end.”