It's actually much more complicated that.It pumped because of another Elon Musk tweet, as far as I'm aware.
The way I understand it is basically, a bunch of Redditers on r/wallstreetbets (really) were egging each other to buy GameStop stock. Enough of them did this on Robinhood that groups that buy Robinhood data and use it for algorithm trading also bought massive positions on the sudden trend (Citadel I think is one). This caused a massive short squeeze as large investment funds tried to quickly cover. The same thing is now happening with AMC.
Thinking about buying a few shares of VIX actually but I am not sure. Thoughts?