Should I buy ~$2200 of a hot stock or invest elsewhere?

Your debt is insane. Forget investing, pay off your debt. You owe 100% of your salary, with only one smallish asset (6K in the bank). Sure you have a car, but the value of the car is falling rapidly and can be taken to near zero by a simple accident.

Once you have your debts paid off (or at least to a reasonable level) you can think about investing. The 401K is the best place to start as you alluded to.

Okay so you have some money left over and you want to do some other investing. What is the goal of that investing? If your desire is to learn about the stock market, and play a bit, then sure, by a few shares of some hot stock.

If your goal is to buy a house, then a savings account is probably best.

It all depends on what you want to do.

Forget investing, you need to focus on managing your debt.

I would keep the 6k in a checking or savings account because you need that money in case of an emergency.

If you save up more than 10k, use the excess to pay down the principal on your debt. Worry about investing when you have a positive net worth.

Can you afford to lose the $2200? If not, the answer is don't buy the stock.

No one can tell you if a stock will continue to go up. But the general rule is that the more hype there is on a stock, the more likely it is that it's reached a top and is due for a downward correction soon. Also note that the more expectation there is for a company, the more negatively the market will react if the company's earnings report comes in even slightly below expectation, or if the company hints at a slowdown in the future. If that buyback doesn't happen you mentioned, expect the stock to drop a lot. Only a really positive surprise news announcement will make it continue to rise on earnings day.

If you really want to buy this stock, my advice would be to learn about chart patterns and other basic technical analysis to have at least some idea of whether the stock is due for a correction soon. (If you see it grow in a hockey-stick shape upward, it probably is.)

As per everyone else: it's hard to make/earn off savings and investments the same amount you pay in interest on debts. That's literally how the financial sector makes its profits. It's a good idea to have some emergency slush but... how much are you spending each month just servicing your debts? If you can afford to start putting $4000~5000 a year into a pension plan, and already can save a good $500 a month... pay that shit down. You can get rid of 10% of it in a year, and that has an immediate payoff, a lot of the time, in reduced minimum/regular repayments, if the statutory term stays the same. Which gives you more money to play with and "invest" in paying it off. It could be gone in rather less than 10 years. Then you have a fair bit of extra cheese to actually invest...

(Or at least ... actually be able to put a deposit together and get a mortgage, buy a house, so no longer paying rent, then focus on paying THAT off quickly... the above is partly based on my experience paying my mortgage down... even though I didn't have much spare when doing that, I was able to chip away enough over a couple years to reduce repayments by nearly 25%... which meant more money in my pocket instead of going back to the lender afterwards. The compound interest is where they get you... and that builds up quickly during the early part of a loan repayment period, whilst it takes quite a long time to get going when you're saving)