Full disclosure: lost a fair bit of money on this whole debacle.
It seems like the short squeeze ended fairly early in the price escalation, and everything that followed was mainstream media advertising one of the largest pump and dump schemes of the century.
There's a large following of "bag holders" concocting conspiracy theories about stock ownership and future squeezes, and there might be, but that jumping to $450 was retail investors creating a huge ponzi scheme.
I doubt we'll ever get the full story about what happened, but a lot of people lost a lot of money in what were probably their first purchases in the stock market.