Or they could have been doing something similar with cryptos without risking SEC or requiring ID on exchanges: using the twitter accounts to announce partnerships with one of the cryptocurrencies. Probably less gain then with stocks but more than with this simple scam.

This would have been excellent. It's really shocking that the offenders had the knowledge/power to get into the twitter account but didn't do something like this.

Quite genius.

More profitable but more likely to be caught.

Probably true - though there's already a ton of short interest in the company. Seems like you could take a few million in profits and still blend in fairly seamlessly.

The problem with that is that the market assimilates new information rather quickly, so the downward spike in price would be rather short lived. It would be rather trivial for the SEC to figure out a short list of suspects from those who bought to close a large short position in that small timeframe, even in a highly liquid security such as TSLA.

SEC can just reverse the trade. For shady sht crypto is superior

The stock market is way more regulated and you'd be caught

yeah and then the SEC freeze your account and you go to jail and get $0