On January 28, 2021, one day after the trading price of GME reached an all time high of $380 pre-split (according to historical trading data), in one of the most dramatic events in stock market history, numerous stock brokerages disabled the ability of customers to purchase additional shares of GME.
It was this dramatic action that succeeded in destroying the momentum that was causing the trading price of GME to soar continuously upward, and ultimately putting an end to the sneeze of January 2021, an event that subsequently received a congressional hearing , investigations into Robinhood and other entities, multiple documentaries, TV shows, and soon the Dumb Money movie.
As investors of GameStop have subsequently come to learn, the January 2021 sneeze cannot be properly understood without realizing that the conditions that existed to enable such a dramatic event necessarily happened in an environment of systemic financial fraud that includes egregious naked short selling and failures to deliver.
If they did not take the action to shut off the buy button, then every short hedge fund, and also larger financial entities including brokerages and even market makers, would likely have faced bankruptcy and total destruction. As Thomas Petterfy of IBKR said, "we have come dangerously close to the collapse of the entire system, and the public seems to be completely unaware of that, including congress and the regulators."
By shutting off the buy button they succeeded in delaying such destruction. But this has instead resulted in GameStop investors continuing relentlessly in the pursuit of the truth and understanding and ultimately towards DRS.
As of the most recent financial report (Q1 2023), roughly 25% of all officially issued shares of GME are owned by about 200,000 individuals who have directly registered their shares of GME with GameStop's transfer agent Computershare.
The GameStop saga is far from over, but most financial propaganda would have the world believe that it ended not too long after the buy button was turned off. For what benefit would they want the masses of the world to believe that it is over?