Andrew Kelly/Reuters
- Elon Musk riffed on J. Robert Oppenheimer's iconic quote years before the release of "Oppenheimer."
- The Tesla boss joked he was destroying short sellers with memes, and recently tweeted he still is.
- Michael Burry, Jim Chanos and others have bet against Tesla stock, which has skyrocketed since 2020.
Elon Musk nodded to the "father of the atomic bomb" more than two years before the release of "Oppenheimer" in cinemas last weekend. He joked his deployment of memes had decimated the investors betting against Tesla stock - and has now posted a fresh warning to short sellers.
"I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts," Musk tweeted in February 2021, riffing on J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous quote after he witnessed the first explosion of a nuclear bomb in July 1945.
"And they keep coming back for more …" the Twitter owner and Tesla and SpaceX CEO replied to his tweet on Saturday.
Musk's latest tweet suggests he's still waging war on short sellers. Tesla's stock price, adjusted for stock splits, has skyrocketed from below $30 at the start of 2020 to $260 today, an increase of more than 700%. The breathless climb has boosted the electric-vehicle company's market capitalization to $815 billion, or more than 10 times its revenue and 64 times its net income last year.
Tesla's aggressive valuation has spurred the likes of "The Big Short" investor Michael Burry and Jim Chanos to place bearish bets against it in recent years, and publicly predict its stock will nosedive. However, short interest against Tesla is currently low at about 3%, according to Nasdaq data.
Musk has repeatedly voiced his disdain for short sellers, and cheered on the meme-stock traders trying to punish them. Memesters executed short squeezes on beaten-down stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment in early 2021, in part because they wanted to get back at the Wall Street firms betting on those companies' demise.
The Tesla chief embraced the wider mania around questionable assets at the time. For example, he tweeted "GameStonk!! and linked to the WallStreetBets subreddit in January 2021. He also hailed dogecoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency, as "the people's crypto" in February of that year.
Musk probably flagged his past Oppenheimer-inspired tweet to tap into the current buzz around the biopic and its ongoing clash with "Barbie," which has led to a deluge of "Barbenheimer" jokes and memes. But his follow-up tweet suggests that pesky short sellers are still on Tesla's radar.