Oh, brother. This article is from a massive, mainstream financial news site, and is reposted all over the internet. But the short-sellers come here, to a niche tech site, to try to influence people to...what exactly?
Buy / sell Tesla stocks; the general audience here is the hip Silicon Valley startup crowd, of which some are 20-some year old instant-millionaires whose hip startup was bought by Google/Facebook/Paypal/etc, or who are making over 100K a year. You probably shouldn't underestimate the net worth and expendable income of the crowd here, or how easily they're influenced. It doesn't take much to get a stock to travel in an upwards direction, and even the slightest increase will cause some people or organizations to make a lot of money.