Plenty of billionaires shorted Tesla, none shorted FTX
Last Updated on 6 November 2023 by CryptoTips.eu
In May of last year, billionaire Elon Musk accused his fellow billionaire Bill Gates of taking a short position against Tesla worth several hundred millions of dollars. Gates did not deny and when at the end of the year it turned out that the Tesla shares had dropped a good 70%, many other Californian billionaires appeared to have copied Gates’ bet.
It also turned out that there were a lot of gigantic short positions against Do Kwon’s crypto coin Terra. The crypto coin Terra went bankrupt last year as you recall.
It is therefore remarkable to see that not a single large short position was taken against FTX (by shorting the FTT currency, for example). Where were all those billionaires and hedge funds? Was it because they were friends with Sam Bankman-Fried but not Elon Musk?
Tesla and Terra
Silicon Valley billionaires made a lot of money shorting Tesla last year. In May, Elon Musk already realized that some of his colleagues had been betting against his company.
At the time, Elon Musk accused Microsoft founder Bill Gates in a tweet of betting as much as half-a-billion dollars that shares of the electric-car company would fall. In a text exchange between the two billionaires leaked online that Musk said was authentic, the Tesla CEO asked Gates if he was still shorting the stock. At the end of the year, Gates looks like a genius of course.
Another well-known 2022 short bet is that of hedge fund Galois Capital, who made millions by shorting Terra, Do Kwon’s famed cryptocurrency. Galois Capital’s Kevin Zhou saw early on that something was wrong with Do Kwon and took a huge short. He became not only very rich, but also very famous in Asia. The problem is that he was only able to cash in half of his winnings. The rest of the money is trapped on the crypto platform of…you guessed it…FTX.
Innocent
With all those shorts it is therefore so strange that apparently no one realized that FTX would go bankrupt. Yahoo Finance asked several traders this week, but no one could really answer why they were willing to bet against Elon Musk, but not against Sam Bankman-Fried. At the start of 2023, Sam Bankman-Fried is in bad shape (even though he still claims he’s innocent) and will likely end up in prison. Musk may be less wealthy, but still a billionaire.
