So the stock market can be manipulated so easily and people can get rich off essentially nothing?  is this legal?  moral?

The legality of this has not yet been decided. If this was just a bunch of rookie investors trying to take down a couple of hedge funds, that is one thing. But if it was started by competition to those hedge funds, which seems more likely, that may well be considered illegal. 

I have a hard time believing that a bunch of 20 something year old's had the financial savvy to destroy a few billion dollar companies, without help. 

A few stocks were manipulated; not the entire stock market.  There's a huge difference.  Most people here are losing money in the end.  You won't find enough people to rally around a grudge (which is what this was) very often when it destroys their pocketbooks.

I think we’re going to find out that not as many people as “WallStreetBets” on Reddit would want you to believe got rich off of this whole GameStop thing actually DID get rich. I think we’re going to find out that a lot of them may have even lost money. Including me. Obviously the people who got in it at the beginning of it knew what they were doing and made some nice fay stacks of cash. money. But I suspect THOSE folks have all probably cashed out by now. Why wouldn’t they have? And the less experienced ones...the Reddit newbs... are going to get left holding the bag. As in “Ponzi Scheme”. So I don’t think its as “easy” to play the system as you might think. Not for the average person anyway. Maybe for the more sophisticated investors. But the more sophisticated institutional investors were the same ones who were shorting the stocks to begin with. So it was really a battle between the sophisticated institutional short sellers and the sophisticated Reddit “short squeezers”, all of whom know more about how to game the system than the Reddit newbs do, and they’re probably just using the enthusiastic but clueless newbs to help them pump up these worthless stocks so they can get rich and leave the newbies holding the bag. Much like Trump did telling all his fanatical but clueless supporters to storm the Capitol and after they did he left them holding the bag. I hope I’m wrong about all of this by the way because yesterday I bought $105 worth of AMC shares. Oy.

This isn't the 1920s where the information needed to pull off a game stop isn't readily available. Any idiot can run a stock screener and find companies with abnormal statistics. Humans are kind of slow when it comes to processing all the available information. So it's refreshing to see that every now and then, market excesses get responded to.