Tesla is the most shorted stock in the market — bet against for 3 straight months

Tesla CEO
Elon Musk.
Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Tesla was the most shorted U.S. large-cap stock for the third consecutive month in August, securities firm Hazeltree said.
Charter Communications and Apple were the second and third most shorted large-cap names.
Tesla stock rallied as much as 10% on Monday after Morgan Stanley published a bullish research note.

Tesla was the most shorted large-cap stock in U.S. markets last month, securities firm Hazeltree found in a new report.

Researchers wrote that Elon Musk’s EV maker topped the list for the third consecutive month. A short position means investors are betting that the share price of a company will decline. 

The second and third most popular large-cap stocks to short were Charter Communications and Apple, respectively, according to Hazeltree, which tracks 12,000 equities around the world. 

Musk took to X on Monday in response to an article about Bill Gates’ previous short position against Tesla. 

“Taking out a short position against Tesla, as Gates did, results in the highest return only if a company goes bankrupt!” Musk wrote. “Gates placed a massive bet on Tesla dying when our company was at one of its weakest moments several years ago. Such a big short position also drives the stock down for everyday investors.”

Meanwhile, Tesla stock surged as much as 10% on Monday after Morgan Stanley published a bullish research note and upgraded it to “Overweight.”

Tesla has lofty upside potential because of its Dojo supercomputer, which the bank thinks could add another $500 billion to the company’s market cap.

“The same forces that have driven AWS to reach 70% of Amazon total EBIT can work at Tesla, in our view, opening up new addressable markets that extend well beyond selling vehicles at a fixed price,” analyst Adam Jonas said. “The catalyst? Dojo, Tesla’s customer supercomputing effort in the works for the past 5 years.”