Thanks. Your last sentence seems to sum up the motive here in my opinion, not so much to screw the short sellers, but to limit/stop the ability of them to influence the value of the company through whatever means.
I don't think the media portrays this battle appropriately. Tesla is the #1 enemy of the combustion engine supply chain and that is no small thing.
Every single auto parts store, every car manufacturer that does not sell EV's, and especially the oil & gas industry is at risk of Tesla's success.
This is a titanic battle. Don't anyone ever forget that.
Tesla cannot manufacture at scale - they do not have the experience or capital to execute on this. Their financial statements demonstrate as much, and the build quality/reliability issues that are prevalent on forums/reddit/twitter demonstrate this.
If Musk gets the funding to go private, gets the 2-4 years of runway he needs to make the business work, that's a good thing.
I'm not a fan of businesses that run red year after year, but in some cases, there are societal benefits that vastly outweigh those concerns. A successful mass-production battery and EV business is something that can have a massive impact on reducing CO2 emissions.
So a lot of people and investors are less concerned about making money and financial models than they are about moving from fossil fuels to renewables. And if Tesla gets a few more years, the profits will come.
If you're only concerned with the bottom line, why are you investing in or against a startup? That seems like gambling to me and if you lose, that's on you, not on Tesla.
For example, the bids on $430 call options expiring in January and June 2019 were down ~20% and ~25%, respectively. If Elon's plan goes to fruition, those options can (probably) never be exercised.
The further out the expiry and the higher the strike, the worse it gets. Liquidity just evaporated, and the spreads are getting wider.
After the very ugly financial news over the last months (but probably true — nobody has credibly refuted them), it‘s not hard to see why Musk and the less rational part of his supporters would love to see short sellers disappear, and „punished“.
Billions on the line create a nasty incentive and a publicly traded company is more at risk of negative attacks when they're not yet profitable.
Every time when TSLA stock was down last year it was some material news regarding missing Model 3 production estimates previously provided by Elon Musk himself or something like that.
https://electrek.co/2018/07/24/tesla-troll-short-doxxed-oil-...