Elon Musk revealed that he has heard that Bill Gates had a big short position on Tesla (TSLA), and he might have lost a lot of money on it.
Billionaires Musk and Gates don’t always have good words to say about each other, but they do appear to share similar concerns about climate change.
However, Gates made some strange comments about electrification last year, including that electric trucks, like the Tesla Semi, and electric airplanes will “probably never” work.
In a new interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Musk was asked about those comments from gates.
Tesla’s CEO responded:
“He didn’t know what he was talking about. Probably somebody told him that and he is just not that close to the physics of it. I don’t think he is ill-intentioned here, I just think he doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
He added Tesla already has working prototypes of electric trucks that are transporting cargo – something that we already pointed out in our original report about Gates’ comment, including the fact that not only Tesla has working electric semi truck programs, but also other automakers like Daimler.
But then Musk revealed that he has heard that Gates was betting against Tesla with a large short position:
“I also heard that at one point he had a large short position. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems weird. People I know who know the situation pretty well, I asked them “are you sure?” and they said “yes, he has a huge short position on Tesla”. That didn’t work out too well.”
We have reached out to Gates’ foundation to see if we could get a comment on Musk’s claim, and we will update if we get an answer.
Tesla has sometimes been the most shorted stock on the NASDAQ, and people who bet against the electric automaker lost $38 billion in 2020.
Electrek’s Take
This would be surprising to me.
Bill Gates doesn’t seem like the shorting type, but you never know. He did have a weird stance on electric vehicles on occasions, and he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of Elon nor Tesla.
That doesn’t mean that he has been betting against the company though.
I don’t have an actual problem with shorting like Elon and some other people recently with what happened on Reddit and with Robinhood, but when it comes to shorting Tesla, it’s a bit different for me.
I understand if you believe that the company is overvalued and you want to make money on a correction, but I feel that betting against Tesla’s stock is also betting against accelerating the electric transition.
I’d hope Bill Gates wouldn’t do that.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
