Can someone explain to me what this means? that a share is held by a short seller?
In essence: a short-seller is betting that the price will drop in the future. The practice is controversial with TSLA shareholders because Elon Musk constantly hates on the practice, but its not really considered a bad thing by the greater investing community.
Short-sellers lose if the stock price goes up, or if dividends are distributed. In effect: short-sellers can ONLY make money if the company money in the long run.
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Long-holders (typical shareholders) win from short-sellers, because short-sellers provide more shares for the company without actually diluting the overall stock.
Lets say 1-million shares exist, but 17% of them are held by short sellers. That means the company has 1,170,000 shares in circulation (+17%), allowing more long-holders to benefit in case the share price goes up.
Furthermore, the long-holder that is loaning their shares to the short-seller benefits: because when you loan your shares out, the short-seller pays you an interest rate.
This is the classic "bulls vs bears" situation. If the stock price drops in the long term, short-sellers win. If the price increases in the long term, then long-holders win.
What I think it means is that the value of the short positions is 17% of Tesla's market cap?
The insurance company will get their 1 million shares in three months but it will get an income of $2.7 million. This means the portfolio is generating a positive return or it lowers the effective cost of the shares. But by helping short sellers it can wipe out your portfolio.
eg If the short seller(s) force the price down to $150 your shares have lost about $120 million.
When a short-seller is done with their term, they have to BUY the shares back. When short-sellers buy (to cover), the price increases back.
In the long term, a short-seller sells the stock (which will drop the price), but then has to buy the stock later (which increases the price of the stock). The long-term trend of any short-seller is neutral at the worst-case.
> In 2018, Tesla said, it delivered 245,000 cars, mostly in the United States. The research firm IHS Markit, which tracks state motor-vehicle data, counted registrations of 164,000 new Teslas nationwide.
That's a pretty interesting and potentially damning finding. I don't see why anyone would buy an expensive car from Tesla and then fail to register it. It's possible that IHS is just missing legitimately registered cars, but given the long list of exaggerated or just plain false claims made by Musk and Tesla it doesn't seem impossible that they are exaggerating their metric for number of cars delivered.
Overall, Tesla clearly has a demand-problem demonstrated by Q1 numbers (30% drop in deliveries, even as the company cut prices worldwide and expanded to China + Europe deliveries). But I don't see any reason to distrust the numbers Tesla is giving out.
At any rate, large individual EVs with zippy 0-60 times are a piss-poor solution to the problem of climate change.
20 bucks an hour is not bad money for just a few photos
