That’s not really true. The stock is flat over the past year. To be a musk investor now, you have to accept that you’re late to the party, and enjoy buying into rich valuations with a lot of hype baked in.

What is not true?

The nature of shorting is that you make money only when stock drops significantly in a short period of time.

If stock is flat, you loose your money. All of it.

If stock drops less than premium you paid for the option, you loose money.

If stock drops a day after your option expiration date, you loose money.

This year there were a couple of dips (~20% in short period of time) where you could have made money shorting. Caveat: if you timed it perfectly and good luck with that.

To put real numbers: a 3 month short will cost you about 10% of stock price. To make money stock price would have to drop more than 10% and you would have to execute the short at the right time in that 3 month window (as opposed to waiting for even bigger drop and loosing because the stock went up).

Even with TSLA stock gyrations in the last year, that's a bet very unlikely to have been profitable for most people.

You’re talking about buying puts, which is different from shorting the stock. If you short a stock that stays flat, you’re out your borrowing costs but nothing more.

Also you could have sold long dated call spreads for most of the year - effectively shorting the stock with some profit to show for it.

Edit: you’re also more likely to have lost money buying Tesla over the past year vs shorting it, so it really hasn’t been “expensive” to short it.

You seem to be confused between short selling and puts.