The business rivalry between tech giants Elon Musk and Bill Gates only seems to be intensifying, with the former recently sending a stern warning to the Microsoft co-founder. Gates, who has long maintained his short position against Musk’s Tesla organization, has come under fire for his investment tactics. Now, the SpaceX CEO has issued a mandate on social media, strongly urging Gates to settle his business with the vehicle company.
Elon Musk has a message for Bill Gates
The conflict between the two tech moguls seems to have escalated due to recent developments.
On November 15, Barchart reported that the Bill Gates Foundation had “dumped 65% of its Microsoft $MSFT position for a total of $8.8 Billion.”
Assessing this development, the official X (formerly Twitter) account of Tesla Owners Silicon Valley theorized that Bill Gates decided to take this action in order to cover his short position against Tesla.
This prompted a firm response from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who declared that Gates should start thinking about closing his long-held short position against his company. “If Gates hasn’t fully closed out the crazy short position he has held against Tesla for ~8 years, he had better do so soon,” the billionaire entrepreneur posted on his X profile on November 16.
In financial terms, holding a short position refers to a common investment strategy wherein an investor borrows shares of stock and immediately puts them for sale on the open market. They then wait for the market price of the shares to fall and buy the same amount of shares at a cut-price rate when it does. Having bought the shares at a lower rate than what they were sold for, the investor earns a profit following this ordeal.
Notably, Elon Musk had sent a similar message to Bill Gates regarding his short position around the same time last year. Taunting the Microsoft co-founder for his tactics, he said on X, “If Tesla does become the world’s most valuable company by far, that short position will bankrupt even Bill Gates.”
The feud between the two tech giants began when Gates reportedly lost $1.5 billion in a bet against Tesla’s stock performance. Meanwhile, he has yet to respond to Musk’s latest warning.
Originally reported by Apoorv Rastogi on Mandatory.
