At this point in Tesla's history, how is it a fraud? It is manufacturing and selling cars. It is building batteries. I can see where some may think it is not living up to the hype/promise of returns, but they are actually making and selling product. Yet people are still claiming fraud?
However short selling at its core just involves the belief that a company is overvalued. In the case of extreme fraud, the "correct value" is $0. In most cases, the short seller just believes it's some amount less than the current share price (but above $0).
Tesla falls into the latter category. I'm sure some do claim fraudulent behavior, but Tesla is an interesting case because Tesla's PE is ~200 IIRC, compared to the 20 average for the automotive industry. For comparison, Amazon's PE is 120.
So if you think Tesla is ultimately a car company, or even just a "regular" tech company, it's not insane to think that it's incredibly overvalued. That doesn't mean you think it's a fraud, of course, but the subtlety obviously gets lost by many (and short sellers often make grandiose edicts that don't help their case).
TSLAs PE is 896 as of market close today (371.74/.4140) and had a PE of ~1213 at its ATH price of 502.49/share
But yeah, there’s a valid non-malicious reason to believe Tesla is overvalued.
There is literally no company on the planet that can justify a 896 PE
Let's see how long Tesla can keep things going with 1,000 PEs
They are projected (based on stock valuation) to take over all or most of
cars energy solar power
Which is quite an absurd assumption
Musk may hate them, but there's is little-to-no daylight between him and the short sellers at this point; both think Tesla's stock is currently overvalues and are selling it to cash in on the current high valuations. :)
Where did he ever say Tesla was overvalued?
They do appear to be generating income from operations these days, but the size of the operation has increased so fast that it is hard to analyze.
But even if they weren't, there's a lot of daylight between unprofitable and fraudulent!
I'm just relaying what I have heard and read. Tesla's history is far from perfect. I think the target of issue has been their various claims and promises on 'self-driving' and their autonomous vehicle programs. Also, some possible issues surrounding the acquisition/merger of SolarCity.
And while the shorts around Tesla aren't making much noise right now given all the momentum, it wasn't all that long ago that there were some loud short sellers alleging about various accounting frauds. Some quick 'internet research' here will dig up various allegations and statements from the 'haters'.
More common at issue is that many traditional auto analysts' existing equity valuation models for auto companies 'break' when you plug in the numbers for Tesla - making it impossible to come to a 'reasonable' valuation they are comfortable buying at (as these are people investing other people's money need to be able to point to something that justifies the purchase if it goes south).
I don't subscribe to this narrative, but it's an easy one to spin when your stock is the one being short sold.
If you promise a bunch of long holders that a particular short trade is guaranteed to make profit, would they not take it out of concern for people?