| My understanding is, that short sellers look for reasons to assume a company is over-valued (for whatever reason), calculate an more reasonable evaluation and then short sell for that value. Doesn't mean it is always fraud. Oesn#t mean they are always right. But more foten thn not, they seem to be very rational about it. Given the amount of money they are moving around, they better are. For Tesla, it means that, more likely than not, it has nothing to do with Elon. And more with things like: - Is Tesla a car manufacturer or a "tech" comapny? If the former, it is over-valued, if the latter, it is much less so. - Some, I'd say questionable, business deals. E.g. the Musk family bail out of Solar City, the sometimes not so clear intercomapny lending between Musks enterproses (SpaceX, Tesla,...) - Musk seeming lack of focus on Tesla, he does work drectly on a lot f other ventures in parallel - Musk's pubic behaviour, which seems of compared to other CEOs. Especially in the car industry, which has again a ot to do with the first point - Corporate governance, that seems to be abit strange in Tesla's case. Normally, when publicly traded comapnies have that kind of trouble with the SEC, it is a bad sign. Sure, Musk plays a role in all of that. But liking or not liking him is, IMHO, the least reason why someone would put millions at the table to short Tesla. Regarding the big four, so. If you think back to the time before Enron and SOX, it was a lot worse. Since then, the Big Fur had split up operations, auditors have to change every coupe of years. That being said, they could a lot stricter. I was way to deeply involved in one audit once, and I wouldn't have signed of balance sheet. Well, they kind of did only bcause the subsidiery I was involved in contributed a tiny fraction and everthing else added up. But still. Also, Wirecard is a German company, so a lot of the SEC rules don't apply. Doesn't make it any better so. |