From the article "Officials say lightning struck the roadway, causing a chunk of asphalt to fly through the windshield of the truck. Both people inside the vehicle were transported to hospitals with unspecified injuries."
It doesn't matter if you have $100 or $100,000,000,000; if you short a $17 stock on leverage and it goes up to $300+ then you're going to lose a LOT of money. They could get bailed out by the government after this is over and maybe change the laws so that they can secretly short stocks without...
To give more specific information, one particular hedge fund somehow shorted more GME stock than there actually exists, and did so with significant leverage. This means that just as their gains would have been much larger had the stock have gone down, their losses will also be much larger now...
There was obviously some kind of a scuffle in the video when the person filming purposely turned the camera away and the defenders started to say "Get the **** away!".
The standard is not were you scared, but would a reasonable person be scared? Obviously I think the woman who pulled a gun was in a situation where a reasonable person would be scared, but I just wanted to point out the correct standard.