One side of the trade hopes to get rich selling the stock, the other hopes to get rich buying it. This year, it was in fact the buy side which got rich, but there's no inherent moral superiority of one side over the other (Have you ever considered that the market participant which by definition sold more Tesla stock than any other, overall, is… Tesla?)

I really don't understand the moral outrage directed at people shorting a stock. Personally, I reserve my opprobrium for stuff like getting people to pre-pay thousands of dollars for features that keep getting pushed back year after year, or shipping software in a twilight zone of autonomy that works fine 99.9% of the time and accelerates into a wall at 90mph the rest of the time.

And "gaming the market"? As in announcing an inexistent bid to take the company public?

But YMMV.