Once it became clear he'd get nothing more than a slap on the wrist for that stunt they backed off and the hype machine had no counterbalance.
Once the shorts do come back though they will come back with a vengeance.
He's been pretty clear that he thinks shorting, as it works right now, is dirty pool and should be illegal.
I try to stay out of esoteric finance stuff, but it's hard the way the world works these days. I kinda think he has a point about naked shorts, at least, Gamestonk showed everyone an ugly failure mode for that one.
So my take is that the huge Tesla pump was just a side effect, this was Elon taking something personally and wading in like the 800 pound gorilla he is.
No opinion on whether he should have been punished more, or deserved it, I basically don't understand where the boundaries on market manipulation or insider trading or any of those things are really supposed to be. Just moderately confident that he was personally trying to rake short sellers over the coals, not so much moon Tesla stock to an insane valuation.
You're saying he committed securities fraud for a higher moral purpose and you're moderately confident that the fact it led to him briefly becoming the richest man in the world didn't motivate him in any way?
That's quite an interesting claim.
Tesla's valuation is insane, it's great evidence that markets are just kind of broken right now. We could speculate on why, but I decline to do that right now.
It appears to me that he mostly focuses on the fundamentals of his companies, including engaging in braggadocio and performance art to pump interest and keep people thinking about what he's doing. But the point of crap like "full self driving", in my opinion, is to sell Teslas. Pumping Tesla stock is a nice side effect, right up until it isn't.
My point is that if Tesla can get robustly profitable, but the stock declines to some reasonable multiple of actual revenue, Elon would count the negative thirty billion dollars next to his name on the Forbes list as a win.