So I bought into GME at an absurdly high price at $380+ (yay gambling) for fun. I'm /still/ trying to figure out what's going on. I tried googling but the explanations that I found didn't answer my question.

Let's say there are theoretically 10 shares of a company. When you buy stock, you are buying a share.

So, everyone before me was buying stocks at like $1. So let's say 10 people bought all 10 share at $1.

So some people borrow stocks and sell them. Theoretically, they will buy them at a lower price at return these stocks to the people they borrowed them from. The thing is, these limited 10 stocks are already spoken for. There are still ten shares, with 1 IOU.

So the theory (if I'm getting this right) is that if no stocks are selling, they are legally obligated at some point to buy them and give them back they will have to pay more for them, draining them of resources.

And if the 10 stocks are already spoken for, how do we buy more shares? Doesn't this necessitate that the company create more shares to sell to more people? If the price is going higher, that means someone is asking more to sell their share right? But the fact that we are buying means someone is selling their finite resource? So when I buy 10 shares of the company, assuming all 10 shares are already spoken for, what am I actually buying? Am I buying these IOUs? Am I even buying a real share? I understand why it's important to hold, but I don't understand what I'm buying.

In addition, what's stopping the company from just creating more shares to drive down the price to sell to the short seller? Also, why do short attacks work? From the explanations in the sub, it's people selling shares to each other at slightly lower prices, right? But doesn't this mean that the shares are still spoken for so it shouldn't go down in value?