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Comment by nateglims | Hacker News Reader

I know it's fun to hate on billionaires these days, but it's not a conspiracy to short sell. If you look at the PE ratio and look at the automotive market and other telsa ventures, it's perfectly reasonable to believe it will not "clear the runway" with growth. The short sellers also happened to be really wrong this year.

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Gated was hated for ages, received pies in his face and lost over 1 trillion by diversifying his portfolio.

Why does an extremely rich person want to bet a billion dollars against EVs?

I'm assuming here: It was a hunch where he probably was thinking that the incumbent auto-makers would catch up and squash the new guy. People make these decisions all of the time based on what they know and how history has played out.

They're not neccessarily betting against electric vehicles if they short Tesla .. they're betting that other companies will pass them in the race.

They are specifically betting the stock will go down. That could be for a number of reasons and from the article, shorting was slightly profitable in the second half of the year. Perhaps around Cybertruck news.

The simplest answer is they wanted to make money because they thought the stock was over valued. It is probably not due to EVs or Telsa specifically. Some people made a lot of money from it recently. From the article:

> The losses by short sellers are a stark contrast to a year ago, when shorts made a $15.9 billion profit on Tesla shares as the company’s stock lost 65% of the value.

But I'm also not sure where this idea of a whale short seller is coming from. With $13bn in losses almost entirely in 6 months, I would have to imagine there's just some riskier institutional investors.

Another way to look at it is they made it cheaper for people who are bullish on tesla to buy stock.

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