Portuguese 
English 
Spanish 
4 min of reading 
0 comments 
The War Between Elon Musk and Bill Gates Intensifies With the Short Selling of Tesla Shares. What Does This Mean for Investors?
It’s not the first time sparks have flown between Elon Musk and Bill Gates due to the investments of the Microsoft founder. As Walter Isaacson reports in the biography of Elon Musk, both billionaires have been involved in a tense dispute over Gates’s short position in Tesla.
Again, a post on his X profile ignited the fuse between both billionaires, who have remained distant since that incident.
A Free Warning
-
Brazil lost 1.2 million truck drivers in a decade, and Santa Catarina has 8,000 trucks idle due to a lack of drivers because young people no longer want to take on the profession that sustains the country.
-
Heavy rainfall is already forecast to hit the Northeast this Thursday, April 23rd, and the peak of instability could cause up to 100 mm of accumulated rainfall with winds of up to 100 km/h in coastal areas, advancing across almost the entire region.
-
The new fine-tooth comb of Bolsa Família in 2026 uses continuous cross-referencing of banking and government data, and five types of beneficiaries are immediately targeted for automatic blocks by the federal government.
-
After 8 years of negotiation, the rice sector in crisis in SC signs a 10-year contract to export 400,000 sacks to Central America, with the first ship leaving in May and a promise to alleviate the oversupply that is putting pressure on prices in Brazil.
Out of nowhere, the Microsoft founder found himself involved (again) in Elon Musk’s talk against investors betting against Tesla. The spark arose when a user dedicated to investment analysis referenced the short sellers of Tesla who bet on the decline in the stock price of the company led by Elon Musk.
The response from the South African billionaire was swift: “Once Tesla completely solves autonomy and has Optimus in volume production, anyone still holding a short position will be annihilated. Even Gates,” the CEO of Tesla posted on X.
Investing In What?
Short positions or short selling are a type of investment that bets on a value’s decline. Typically, in the stock market, an investor buys shares of a company expecting its price to rise. This way, they receive more money for each share when they sell it. However, it is also possible to make money betting on the decline of that share.
First, shares of a company are “loaned” from a broker that offers this service. The investor sells the share with a commitment to buy it back within a specified time and return it. If the investor sells the share for 100 euros and, after a few days, that share loses 50% of its value, when they buy it back, they will pay half of what they got when they sold it. Thus, the investor returns the shares to their owner and made a 50% profit in the process.
If instead of falling, the share rises in price, it’s bad news for this type of investor, as they will have to pay more for it when they buy it back, taking money out of their own pocket. The more the share price (and the company it represents) falls, the greater the benefit.
Bill Gates’s Short Position
As the biographer revealed on CNBC, the conflict between Bill Gates and Elon Musk arose in 2022. Musk wanted to increase his philanthropic contributions, and Bill Gates wanted to show him some projects from his foundation. During his visit to the Austin gigafactory, Musk reprimanded Gates for holding $500 million in short Tesla shares. This outraged Musk, who broke off any negotiation with Gates.
“Sorry, but I can’t take your climate change philanthropy seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change,” Musk wrote in text messages to Bill Gates, according to his biography.
Bill Gates’s Support for Tesla Remains
Despite the confrontation, Bill Gates has maintained in several interviews his support for Tesla and praised the company’s work in electrifying transportation. However, investigations by Fortune were unable to uncover whether the Seattle billionaire still holds his short position in Tesla.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk’s response suggests that, indeed, despite his public support for the company, Bill Gates may have made a lot of money in recent months from the decline in Tesla’s stock price caused by poor sales data from the last quarters of last year and early 2024.
Bill Gates Made a Profit From Musk’s Salary
Poor sales data and the fierce civil war among investors over Elon Musk’s billion-dollar bonus caused the company’s shares to fall by up to 32% on the stock market. This implies that if Bill Gates maintained his short position, he would have achieved an interesting capital gain in recent months.
Annihilate Are Bigger Words
Elon Musk’s message referred to two key milestones to be able to “annihilate” those betting against Tesla: solving the autonomy of its batteries and producing its Optimus android. The threat is not trivial.
According to the CEO’s estimates, each humanoid robot would leave a profit margin of 50%, which would convert to $1 trillion annually. On the other hand, calculations published by Fortune indicate that the fleet of robotaxis, which currently has autonomy as its main obstacle, would report Tesla an additional profit of more than $5 trillion. With these numbers, Tesla would become the most valuable technology company on the planet, ahead of NVIDIA, Apple, or Microsoft. It sounds great, but these are estimates. Reality sometimes follows a different path.
Be the first to react!