Very good of short sellers have good ethics. But what if they don’t? What if they start INTRODUCING bugs to collect the bounties?
Your short position depresses prices below "value", which means that for example an eco-friendly sovereign fund could move in and buy the shorted stock with a discount, if they believe that it's unfairly targeted.
Price was 50, tycoon shorts it down to 45, sovereign fund starts buying until it's back to 50 (let's say they got average price 48), now price is back to 50, yet tycoon is short and if he wants to exit his buying will push price to 52.
So he literally allowed the sovereign fund to buy the shares cheaper, and he paid the delta.
Of course, now price might go up or down, we don't know who ultimately wins.
You should read about how the Hunt Brothers tried to do a thing like this to silver (artificially depress it's price) and how they got burned really hard because smart people saw through it and got on to the other side of the trade.
'freerobby had a good point, somewhere up the thread. I regret taking part in your inane and patronizing distraction from that.
The fact that it doesn't happen should tell you that it's not such a clever idea as it might naively seem. And I just gave one example of how such a strategy could back-fire, by attracting long term investors who like to buy at discounted prices.
The examples you gave don't fit the model. They are all profitable, they do not constitute an existential threat as Tesla does to big oil, and the relative differences in market cap is nowhere near as big between the parties. It's hard to overstate the proportions here -- the entire $12B of short interest in Tesla represents less than 2% of the Big Oil market cap. And that's without touching Aerospace/foreign governments that might want to starve SpaceX by way of Tesla.