Musk: ‘Even Hitler’ was betting against Tesla

CEO uses popular meme to take a dig at short sellers of his company’s stock

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a pop at those who have bet the electric carmaker’s stock would fall — joking that even Adolf Hitler was shorting Tesla’s shares.

Musk circulated a video meme Sunday on Twitter. It depicts Hitler huddling with his generals in his bunker during the final days of World War II. Rather than focusing on the Soviets closing in, Hitler is losing his mind because he got burned by shorting Tesla stock.

Musk tweeted out the scene on Sunday with the comment, “Dang, turns out even Hitler was shorting Tesla stock …”

The way short selling works is that someone borrows shares of a company’s stock, sells the shares, and then hopes for the price to go down so that they can then buy the stock back at a lower price, give the shares back to their original owner, and keep the difference as a profit.

The video Musk tweeted out is a new riff on a meme from the 2004 movie “Downfall” that is making its way around the internet. You may have seen a version of the scene, which has been used in a parody of everything from Hitler being outraged over Miley Cyrus’ infamous twerking performance at the MTV Video Music Awards a few years ago, to Hitler being outraged over Germany’s elimination from the 2018 World Cup, while England made it to the soccer tournament’s semi-finals.

The video Musk tweeted out lumps short sellers into bad company with the likes of Hitler himself. Musk has no love for the short sellers betting against his company, and he can gloat a bit at the moment about how Tesla short sellers have fared recently.

That’s because since Aug. 1, the day Tesla reported its second-quarter results, Tesla’s shares have risen as much as 18 percent. And, according to S3 Partners, which tracks information on shortstock selling, those who have shorted Tesla stock have lost nearly $2 billion in the wake of Tesla’s most-recent results.