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Comment by QuantumGood | Hacker News Reader

I read most of the last article, and he indicates "harm" must be things like "murder", and since short sellers aren't killing they can't be doing anything that would be equated with causing harm. There's a little more gray area to "harm" than just "murder". Severe logical fallacy here.

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I suppose it's possible to read it as declaring an absolute and exhaustive definition of "harm" to include "murder" and absolutely nothing else. But that feels like A) a reach and B) a deliberately uncharitable one at that.

The more charitable and more likely reading is poking fun at a CEO's hatred of people who bet against the CEO's company. Perhaps try re-reading that way?

His analysis is riddled with such fallacies. The other huge one is a conflation of the general with the specific, i.e.:

> the vast majority of the time, when a public-company chief executive officer complains that short sellers are sabotaging his company, he is talking nonsense

Sure, but we're not talking about the vast majority. We're talking about the most heavily shorted stock on a US exchange, and the one which entrenched players are most interested in seeing fail. Tesla is an outlier in myriad ways; deriving assumptions from the median makes no sense at all.

At any given moment in time, some company's stock will be the most shorted in the exchange. Do you have genuine evidence that Tesla shorts are really qualitatively different from other former "most shorted" title holders?

I think the actors who are eager to see Tesla and SpaceX fail are more powerful and motivated than is typical, but I acknowledge this is an unproven hypothesis.

However, Tesla does not need to be exceptional for the larger point to remain. Former heavily shorted companies have dealt with the same thing. Look at the war between Fairfax and hedge funds in the early 00s (similar claims, similarly evidence (i.e. circumstantial but unprovable), similar results (stock took hits and then jumped as financials improved).

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/fairfax-t...

Someone at TMC wrote up a more thorough and Tesla-analogous explanation if you are curious: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/elon-musk-vs-short-s...

the actors who are eager to see Tesla and SpaceX fail are more powerful and motivated than is typical

Why would they be?

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