According to S3 Partners which is a Wall Street analytics firm, short sellers of Tesla stock have made $11.5 billion in profits in 2022, CNN reports, in a pricy demonstration of the automaker and its CEO Elon Musk’s chaotic year.
Overall, it is not a bad return on the $19.6 billion invested in short positions.
Musk himself had sold a lot of his Tesla shares. He said he was done selling them back in August but he did so again. He had violated the same promise after he claimed the same in April too.
His personal wealth spiked high to a whopping $100 billion by November, majorly due to Tesla stock also dropping off a cliff, down by nearly 52 percent this year.
California’s DMV, in the automaker’s home state, accused Tesla of lying to customers with the naming of its “self-driving” features Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) that are technically only advanced driver assistance systems, instead of the fully autonomous ones.
It has also been investigated by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration for crashes involving Autopilot and FSD, with a Department of Justice investigation in the wings too.
Quite expectedly, Tesla stock bottomed out at a two-year low towards the end of November, while Musk’s fiasco with Twitter was going on.
The multi-CEO acquired Twitter for a staggering $44 billion which was more than he bargained for.
In order to compensate for the now-slim wallet, Musk tried to implement a pay-for-verification system on Twitter, while also trying to back out of paying outstanding bills.
Musk even made some of Tesla’s engineers work at Twitter. All of these actions did not paint a pretty picture for financers.
Musk had maintained his brand and wealth by convincing people that he was not just competent, but a genius. Now, this image seems questionable.