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Elon Musk Is No Longer Scaring the Shorts With Tesla Tweet Saga

Elon Musk Is No Longer Scaring the Shorts With Tesla Tweet Saga

(Bloomberg) -- If the goal was burying the short sellers, it hasn’t quite worked out.

As fast as Tesla shares surged after Elon Musk tweeted about going private, they’ve come back down. Mounting skepticism and an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission have erased most of an 11 percent gain.

“It always ends poorly for companies when they’re trying to squeeze the shorts,” said Chris Brown, managing member at Aristides Capital, whose biggest position is a Tesla short. “The idea of a transaction itself is idiotic.”

Elon Musk Is No Longer Scaring the Shorts With Tesla Tweet Saga

As always, audacity is proving a double-edged sword for Musk, whose eight-year battle with public naysayers was a reason he gave for weighing the deal. After going public on Twitter without providing any financing specifics and igniting a frenzy of attention, the 47-year-old billionaire’s gambit has seen its market impact fade.

“I doubled my short position the morning after Musk’s original tweet,” Robert Chapman, money manager at Chapman Capital, said in an email. “The more one learns about this situation, the more this appears to be a fakeover vs. takeover.”

Of course, Tesla’s stock is often portrayed as a pitched battle pitting fervid bears and a megalomaniacal iconoclast. But in reality, Musk has usually won. Shares of the electric-car maker have posted a 47 percent annualized gain since going public in 2010. And despite trading at more than 200 times next year’s earnings, the stock is still up 13 percent this year.

Anchored by a famously loyal shareholder base, the shares suffered only brief setbacks earlier in the year when Musk called a British cave diver in the Thai rescue mission a pedophile and portrayed a former battery factory employee as a saboteur. While he was urged last month by shareholder Baillie Gifford & Co. and bullish venture capital firm Loup Ventures to focus on execution, there’s been no signs of a mass institutional defection.

Tesla traded at $355.90 as of 7:32 a.m. Friday in New York. It was lifted overnight by a CNBC report that Musk previously talked with Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund about a take-private deal and that its board plans to meet with financial advisers next week. The stock was trading at around $357 at the time of his Tuesday tweet.

“If somehow Elon Musk pulls the final rabbit out of the hat and gets the funding for this buyout, that’s $67 upside from its close,” said Brian Frank, portfolio manager at Key Biscayne, Florida-based Frank Capital Partners LLC who was short the stock in the first quarter. “I’m personally skeptical.”

Shorts on Tuesday absorbed a blow that by some measures cost them more than a billion dollars, but their resolve against Tesla -- sometimes hatred -- is proving hard to crack. Overall, accounting for positions that were covered, the loss shrunk to about $304 million as of Thursday, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, head of research at S3 Partners, a financial technology and analytics firm.

“We’ve seen some of the larger shorts increasing their positions a bit,” Dusaniwsky said in an email. “In relative terms to the gains and losses Tesla shorts have incurred over the last several year, this is just a drop in the bucket and not enough to force large margin calls to well capitalized large short players, and definitely not enough to scare any of them out of their positions.”

On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that SEC investigators are intensifying scrutiny of Tesla’s public statements in the wake of Musk’s tweet saying he had “funding secured” for a transaction at $420. Enforcement attorneys were already gathering general information about Tesla’s public pronouncements on manufacturing goals and sales targets, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the review is private.

Musk referred to the company as the “most shorted stock in the history of the stock market” in a letter laying out reasons for going private on Tuesday. Hedge fund managers from Jim Chanos to David Einhorn have been vocal public critics and Tesla’s every utterance is parsed on Twitter by a phalanx of skeptics.

Elon Musk Is No Longer Scaring the Shorts With Tesla Tweet Saga

His tweets failed to send options traders into a buying frenzy -- more the opposite. Despite publication of a buyout target more than 10 percent above prevailing market prices, bearish contracts have seen greater demand in the aftermath. Implied volatility for puts betting on a 10 percent decline in the stock over the next three months, a measure of options cost, is 13.6 points wider than comparable calls, the widest gap on record, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

Hedge fund manager Joe Spiegel of Dalek Capital said he sold calls expiring next week, a position that amounts to a bearish bet on the stock.

“My rough calculation was that if this deal is real (which I doubt), the chance of a topping bid above $420 happening in the next 10 days was extremely low,” Spiegel said. “Even if the deal if real, it is so preliminary that the stock shouldn’t really trade more than $367.50 or so.”

For more on Tesla, check out the Decrypted podcast:

To contact the reporters on this story: Elena Popina in New York at epopina@bloomberg.net;Lu Wang in New York at lwang8@bloomberg.net;Joshua Fineman in New York at jfineman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Chris Nagi

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