In a series of tweets Elon Musk has confirmed that Bill Gates has a $500 million bet that Tesla’s stock will go down.
Thanks to leaked text messages between Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the former billionaire has confirmed the latter one has a short position against Tesla to the tune of $500 million. Musk brought the possible short position to the public’s attention in a February 2021 interview with Joe Rogan when he said that “I heard at one point that he had a big short position against Tesla,” which he didn’t know was true or not. Now, we know it is.
Musk confirmed Gates’ short position when he responded to several leaked text messages posted to Twitter by Whole Mars Catalog. (The twitter account is run by software engineer Omar Qazi, who frequently interacts with Musk on the social media platform.)
“So apparently Bill Gates hit up [Elon Musk] to discuss ‘philanthropy on climate change’ but Elon asked if he still had a half billion dollar short position on $TSLA,” Qazi wrote in a tweet with screenshots of the conversation between Musk and Gates. “Bill said he hasn’t closed it out, so Elon told him to get lost. No idea if this is true lol,” Qazi added.
There was (more than) understandable speculation at first that the text messages were really between Gates and Musk. One of Qazi’s followers said that she couldn’t take the leaked messages seriously because “who the hell doesn’t have an iPhone?” Qazi responded “the guy who founded [M]icrosoft maybe?”
Responding to a question from Qazi to Musk asking if the exchange was real, Musk responded “Yeah, but I didn’t leak it to NYT. They must have got it through friends of friends.” He added that “I heard from multiple people at TED that Gates still had half billion short against Tesla, which is why I asked him, so it’s not exactly top secret.”
In another tweet Musk posted later on, the Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Co. CEO shared a meme showing a fat Bill Gates next to the “pregnant man” emoji. Musk wrote that he posted the tweet “in case u need to lose a boner fast.”
In Musk’s February 2021 interview with Rogan (immediately below), Musk told the podcaster-comedian-fight-commentator that Gates “didn’t know what he was talking about” when he said electric big rig trucks were impossible. Musk gave Gates the benefit of the doubt at the time, however, noting that “he’s probably just not that close to the physics here” and that “I don’t think he’s ill-intentioned here, he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Musk added in the interview that he heard from people he knows who “know the situation well” that Gates had a short position against Tesla, which he thought was “weird.” Presumably because, amongst other reasons, Gates touts himself as a champion of the environment, and no other company on Earth is doing more to push for the adoption of renewable energy than Tesla.
“I think he’s generally got good intentions here,” Musk said, adding that “I think he’s probably just not—I don’t hate Bill Gates to be clear—I think he probably just doesn’t know the science.” Indeed, Tesla has showcased its Tesla semi on many occasions.
As of this writing, #BillGates is trending on Twitter. Gates, who has more than 58 million followers on Twitter, has yet to respond to the matter on the platform.
[UPDATE APRIL 23 1:50 PM]
Machine learning engineer Pranay Pathole has written on Twitter that “By shorting Tesla, Gates has proved he doesn’t care about climate change,” to which Musk has responded “Yeah.”
Feature image: Billionares Success
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