Just a heads up. Having consolidated his power base with the takeover of Markets Live it appears the paper itself is the next target.
Resistance is futile, save yourself.
From the Financial Times, August 11:
Dan McCrum, The Manor, Alphaville-on-Thames, UK
Tesla, which can claim the chief executive with the most erratic Twitter strategy and may yet become the biggest public company taken private, is also due another laurel: the most shorted US stock of the past decade, in dollar terms.
According to data provider IHS Markit, $13bn worth of its shares have been loaned to investors for bets that their value will plummet. Indeed, Elon Musk’s detail-light scheme announced this week to take his electric car company private at a valuation of more than $80bn, including debt, appeared in part a response to those bets. “Being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company,” he said in a letter to employees.
The claim Tesla is the “most shorted stock in the history of the stock market” is more hyperbolic. Globally, that title goes to Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce group with American Depositary receipts traded on the New York Stock Exchange. (It’s a figure boosted by arbitrage trades related to Altaba, the group that contains legacy assets of the Yahoo.)
Yet, with billions of dollars at stake, the Tesla spectacle highlights the scale of short selling in modern stock markets. The very public role of Tesla’s critics, on social media, investment blogs and in the media demonstrates how they have become part of the scenery of US markets, even as the demonisation of such critics has prompted calls for more regulatory disclosure....MUCH MORE
