Oh good grief. The fact that some short-sellers, sometimes, lose money (just like long-buyers!) has fuck-all to do with "how P/L (profit and loss) is computed". As you've got it all figured out, by all means go long on Tesla. Apparently it's free money...

'freerobby had a good point, somewhere up the thread. I regret taking part in your inane and patronizing distraction from that.

If it were so easy to short your competition into the ground you would see Coca Cola short Pepsi, IBM short Microsoft, Adidas short Nike and so on.

The fact that it doesn't happen should tell you that it's not such a clever idea as it might naively seem. And I just gave one example of how such a strategy could back-fire, by attracting long term investors who like to buy at discounted prices.

It's not "easy" (or common) because a lot of unusual things need to line up for it to work. You need an established company with big pockets, a new company that poses an existential threat but which also desperately needs cash, and a credible enough narrative that you can push to the financial markets, to get picked up by the business markets, and create a feedback loop.

The examples you gave don't fit the model. They are all profitable, they do not constitute an existential threat as Tesla does to big oil, and the relative differences in market cap is nowhere near as big between the parties. It's hard to overstate the proportions here -- the entire $12B of short interest in Tesla represents less than 2% of the Big Oil market cap. And that's without touching Aerospace/foreign governments that might want to starve SpaceX by way of Tesla.