After Loving To Hate Tesla, Many Scramble To Reverse
In mid-May electric car maker Tesla hit the goal of delivering its first profitable quarter in the history of the decade-old company, and since then Tesla’s stock has soared and traded at over $90 per share. At the same time, review giant Consumer Reports said last week that Tesla’s Model S outscored "every other car in our test ratings." That’s every other car out there, not just other electric cars.
What followed those milestones has been an interesting mix of attention on Tesla from the media and bloggers — including surprise, extreme 180-degree about-face, and a general lovefest — as well as attention from Wall Street, which bifurcated into newly won-over Tesla-believers and disturbed Tesla shorters.
On the blogging front, for example, in a Business Insider post called "What Everyone Got Wrong About Tesla," a writer chronicles the criticism of Tesla over the years. The writer didn’t include an article from all of 2013 written on Tesla, from Business Insider, called "The Tesla Nightmare Shows Why Today’s All-Electric Cars Are (Basically) Dead On Arrival."
Tesla has actually emerged as a success story gradually over a decade by overcoming hurdles every day.
When it comes to investors, short interest (the amount of shares that investors have sold short, expecting the stock to drop in price) in Tesla since the company went public in 2010 has been nothing short of remarkable. According to Bloomberg, "short interest in Tesla was 40 percent of available shares as recently as April 19, more than eleven times the average of companies in the Russell 1000."
But following Tesla’s milestone, short interest dropped by seventeen percent in the five days through May 13, noted Bloomberg — Tesla shorters were forced to "buy $276 million worth of the automaker’s shares, pushing the company toward the biggest rally in the Russell 1000 Index (RIY) this year."