That perspective would be a refreshing one, but the short interests which are pushing the current narratives are oftentimes not the ones who hope to see your car delivered. Their profits are maximized, not by the delivery of your car, but by volatility in the Tesla stock produced by negative news about a story stock.
I'll give an example. An often repeated story about Tesla is that they are not making a profit off any vehicle they make. It's a false narrative of a very particular type with a very particular goal: it generates confusion about the benefit of infrastructure investment.
It's clearly a false narrative. Investment in infrastructure is obviously a wise move for a company with ambitions as vast as Tesla. So why do you hear this false narrative? It comes down to the company being valued according to the assumption that the company will make these infrastructure investments. There is a causal link between the stock price and the infrastructure investment. If confusion and doubt exist about the value of that infrastructure investment, then it produces volatility which can generate money for the short position.
In truth, these people should be disregarded. However, unfortunately, negative news tends to get more attention than positive news. So the news tends to end up favoring these short-interest fueled stories as a consequence. Plenty of people realize that climate change is real and that we all stand to benefit from Tesla succeeding in its mission. Many people don't realize that the majority of news about Tesla is being fueled by interests who stand to profit from causing harm to the company.
The submarine of the ICE industry pieces on Tesla at least I think people are savvy enough to grasp fairly easily. They tend to have a more obvious structure, with the way a rival auto-industry expert will be brought on to breathlessly talk about how their competitor in Elon Musk is so crazy that he ought to be removed from leading the company or how electric vehicles are impossible or not ready or some other nonsense. Anything to harm their competition. They're just acting according to their own self-interest.
But the amplification of confusion generated by short interests? It was much harder for me at least to understand where that was coming from. I thought the people saying it were idiots up until I got so annoyed with it I downloaded the analysis of Tesla by a firm that was shorting it in which they laid out the way Tesla was a story stock and explained its subsequent volatility. It was really eye opening, because I had expected them to be idiots saying things that were false because they truly believed them, rather than explaining that they figured Tesla would do well, but that their was potential to profit off volatility. It helped me understand the strangeness of the news. The pieces amplifying confusion have more to do with the profit model of news and its relationship with attention, rather than value creation, and some people being clever enough to abuse that.
It's what motivated some of the interest Elon Musk had in going private. These things haven't been done under a rock. The Tesla board has called out the news for their amplification of these lies. Elon Musk has called it out. Plenty of green sector focused news have been calling it out. It's pretty sad that people are struggling to understand it. When tangentially related subjects have been brought up on Hacker News in the past, it was described as paranoia on Elon Musk's part. I guess its easy for Hacker News to understand the submarine that Paul Graham wrote about, since people read his writing, and harder for it to figure it out the rest of the bias, because someone didn't lay out the forces clearly enough. I'm not as good a writer as Paul Graham. I can't get across what I've noticed with as much eloquence. Hopefully people like him continue to be thoughtful and share their thoughts, so that everyone can benefit.
Tesla is the most shorted stock on the stock market. Tesla is a leading player in electrification of transportation. Climate change is leading nations to ban ICE vehicles. Something about these three statements, taken together, is odd. People point to Elon Musk being a fraud, but meanwhile he was so effective in his role at SpaceX that the superpower of Russia can no longer compete with his company in the sector that it is focused on. People say he is incompetent to reduce dissonance, meanwhile his friends and engineers insist otherwise even in the discussions in this news item and even on topics related to engineering rather than business.
