Elon Musk, in the wake of a recent stock surge, aimed his rhetorical guns at rival billionaire Bill Gates on Tuesday. Gates has been among the critics of Tesla and its troubled self-driving car program, but Musk, confident that betting against the electric vehicle pioneer is a loosing bet and flush with bravado, posted to X saying that once Tesla solves the autonomy issues and puts its Optimus prototype into production at scale, investors such as Bill Gates who are shorting the stock are going to have a very bad day.
Optimus is the name of the humanoid consumer-oriented robot assistant that Tesla is developing. According to Forbes, Musk anticipates the project will send the company’s market cap north of $25 trillion once it hits the market.
Musk has know that Gates has been shorting Tesla’s stock since at least 2020, when he made the matter public. Short sellers, expecting a price to fall, structure their leverage, sell, and buy strategies so that they will make money when the stock does poorly. At the time, Musk lambasted Gates in a series of text message. He found it hard to take Gates seriously on the subject of climate change, Musk said, when the Microsoft mogul was shorting the stock of the world’s premier electric vehicle company.
Tuesday July 3 was a day of note for Musk, when he revealed to the public that the second quarter of 2024 saw consumer deliveries fall less than expected, boosting the company’s performance when measured against analyst projections. Tesla beat Wall Street expectations by shipping 443,956 vehicles in Q2 of 2024, a 4.8 percent drop from the same period in 2023—which is half of the Q1 drop vs Q1 2023.
This expectations coup spiked Tesla’s share price by 17 percent, costing Gates and other short sellers up to a cumulative $3.5 billion. While betting against the electric vehicle titan might have looked like a good idea when Tesla bottomed out in April, the 73 percent increase since then tells another story.