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smallgovt

> At least from a PR perspective you don't want to engage like this if you have nothing to hide.

Responding in public fashion is a rational choice for TSLA to make assuming:

1) There exist short sellers who are willing to engage in malicious activities that hurt shareholder value

2) Publicizing their efforts to fight back against said actors acts as a deterrent for further malicious activity.

I don't know for sure, but I think there's a reasonable likelihood that both these statements are true.

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Dude. You gotta let it go. These are pretty unsurprising allegations for a company like Tesla. And short sellers are not the boogieman, they're just an indication that the value of Tesla is highly uncertain.

IDK man, TheDrive pushes non-stop anti-Tesla stories, it's not unreasonable to suspect their motives. Just look at their story history; not exactly unbiased.

I haven't seen any bias. Do you have specific examples of them reporting false or distorted news about Tesla?

Bias !== false or distorted news.

Selective reporting or withholding of information is a form of bias.

Short Sellers are a massive plague on the market, short selling should be banned in general

Free markets work better than controlled markets as history has shown.

the Stock market is VERY far from a free market

We aren’t talking about how it is, we’re talking about how it should be. Banning short selling would remove the ability to hedge a large long position and would remove a necessary check on overvalued companies by providing an incentive to predict their collapse. Short selling serves an important role in the markets and banning it would be overkill and counter productive.

That's not a very libertarian position to take.

Believing the Stock market is a Free market or Supported by Libertarianism shows how little you understand about either the stock marker or libertarianism

Someone motivated to short-sell might be further motivated to state their case publicly. What's wrong with that?

Short selling is part of a functioning market. It's not some evil thing. It's one mechanism the financial world uses to gauge company value. I'm shocked every time I read this conspiracy theory on HN. The positions of these traders are public.

The only response to short sellers is to focus on your business. Responding with "it's a conspiracy" does not help your business.

It just seems odd that a healthy market has actors that profit from the failures of companies. If it's healthy how do I profit from global climate disasters? I'll just keep investing in prison companies for now. /s

Essentially every stock sale (barring a need for immediate cash for another purpose) is a bet that stock isn’t going to perform as well as alternative investments over time. So, yes, pretty much anyone who trades in stock is betting on companies to, if not fail, underperform the market over time.

that's not the same thing, betting one thing will perform better relative another is not the same as profiting from the failures of a single company.

But it doesn't matter what I write if ones only motivation is profit.

People who are short selling are expressing the thesis that the probablity adjusted return from a bet on drop in stock price of one company is worth more than investing in alternatives like an index fund etc. It's exactly equivalent in a market set-up and is balanced by someone else taking the other side of the deal.

> It just seems odd that a healthy market has actors that profit from the failures of companies

Try googling "why do markets allow short selling". First response [1]. tl;dr - short selling helps your retirement account & balances the market when there are bad actors, such as Enron.

> If it's healthy how do I profit from global climate disasters?

You're conflating things. Profit != world health.

Profit is just a human motivational tool, and money is paper trust. I wrote this software that helps your farming equipment run, and I need food. Money smooths these transactions so I don't need to trade goods-for-goods in every scenario.

I don't know how anyone could profit from hurting climate. Ultimately, destroying your environment destroys you. That's like kicking the amniotic sac open. Why do that? To the extent someone is so-motivated, I'd argue they're depressed, not profit-oriented.

> I'll just keep investing in prison companies for now. /s

I don't know whether that's possible for the average person. For a wealthy entity, it's still a risk, because that industry could disappear due to public pressure. Your money may have been better invested elsewhere.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-short-selling-legal-allowed

I find both extremely implausible, both individually and (especially) in combination.

You've never heard of rumor-mongering short sellers?

Very much a real phenomenon, hard to catch them and it's very lucrative.

My favorite example of this is when 4chan spread a fake death rumor of Vitalik Buterin to make money on Ethereum

My favorite short seller is the guy who said Tesla was in delivery hell. Then logistics hell. Then short seller hell.

Because apparently figuring out the basic business functions of your chosen industry is hell.

Fake news right?

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