Short-sellers are seen as evil by the general investing public. They don’t understand that short-sellers can provide liquidity when it’s most needed: at the bottom. If you’re unfortunate enough to own a crappy company, short-sellers are the people who will buy your stock from you at a 90% loss instead of a 95% loss.

Short-selling is also incredibly difficult. Most of the time, short-sellers aren’t finding some obvious (in hindsight) fraud that needs to be brought to light.

Mostly, short-sellers focus on finding stocks that are highly overvalued or are perceived as such, and they are just betting on a reversion to the mean.

And as any short-seller will tell you, the trade can go against you. When it does, you actually end up helping the stock price rise even higher. I don’t know how much of Tesla’s share price is now thanks to an ongoing short-squeeze, but it’s not insignificant. There are still something like $20 billion worth of Tesla shares sold short. That’s $20 billion worth of rocket fuel if the stock keeps bounding higher.