They don’t unless they fabricate news that drives their cost of capital up in a significant way (they were never successful in doing so). “Fighting” short-sellers is something generally only seen with CEOs committing serious fraud so the wall st careerists were all but certain Tesla was a fraud by behavioral pattern recognition that had been working for entire careers. They were wrong, of course, but Elon’s focus on “shorts” was a hugely massive waste of his attention and completely unnecessary. The way you “fight” shorts is by executing and ignoring them.