Kicker - Tesla short shorts

NICK EICHER, HOST: The founder of Tesla and Space X—the irrepressible Elon Musk found a creative way to poke fun at his doubters.

Some vocal investors have long maintained that his company’s stock is overpriced. And to make good on the belief, many of them have shorted Tesla stock. This is a highly sophisticated maneuver that is basically a bet that the stock will lose value and the short-seller profits when it does. 

Should say, if it does. If it doesn’t, you lose your shorts, so to speak.

But this week, Tesla’s market cap surpassed that of Toyota. So to celebrate, Musk decided to razz those who dared to short Tesla stock and he did it by selling shorts. Literally.

On Tesla’s accessories page, the company listed “Tesla short shorts” and offered them for about $70 a pair.

And the response was so overwhelming, it crashed the website perhaps to make the point that even Elon Musk had undervalued them!

For his part, Musk says he plans to send a few pair to the SEC—as he put it—“the Shortseller Enrichment Commission to comfort them in these difficult times.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

(AP Photo/John Raoux, File) In this Sunday, Jan. 19, 2020, file photo, Elon Musk founder, CEO, and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX speaks during a news conference after a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket test flight to demonstrate the capsule’s emergency escape system at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. 

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