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Elon Musk Calls Boss of Tesla Troll Who's Heavily Invested In Oil Industry (electrek.co)

Posted by BeauHD on from the I'm-telling-your-mother dept.

Okian Warrior shares a report from Electrek, written by Fred Lambert: One of Tesla's biggest anonymous trolls/shorts has been doxxed as an investment manager heavily invested in the oil industry. He has now deleted his Twitter account, which he used to promote his blog posts about Tesla and attack anyone saying anything that could be perceived as positive on Tesla, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly called his boss to complain about his behavior.

We are talking about "Montana Skeptic" who has been using Seeking Alpha, a financial blog aggregator, and Twitter to push the bear case on Tesla for the past 3 years. Hiding behind his anonymous persona on social media, Montana Skeptic went beyond just pushing the bear case. He also used the platforms to send insults and attacks to Tesla bulls, bloggers, YouTubers, and reporters discussing anything that he saw as potentially being positive for Tesla, including [this author] on numerous occasions to the point where I had to block him. But now that his real identity has been revealed to be Larry Fossi, a managing director at Rahr Enterprise, which is reportedly heavily invested in oil, we learn that his motivations could have originated from other reasons.

9 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Shorts are running scared... by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Tesla has been hit with a torrent of fake news recently, trying to drive the stock down.

    Most obviously and recently was the following:

    1) Someone (not Tesla) posted that 23% of Tesla reservations have been cancelled.
    2) Based on #1, an analyst downgraded the stock from "hold" to "underperform".
    3) Tesla stock plummeted
    4) Tesla notices #1 above and responded:

    Dunno where this bs is coming from. Who knows about the future, but last week we had over 2000 S/X and 5000 Model 3 *new* net orders. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2018

    (Note: Tesla makes about 6,000 cars/month, so an increase of 7000 cars puts them even further behind on reservations. And as noted in the link below, they have not started showing them in stores yet, so Tesla has yet to tap the "drive before they buy" potential pool of customers.)

    Word on the street is that shorts are running scared, doing everything they can to drive down the stock price. Including insider sabotage, misleading financial spin, and online harassment such as the OP.

    This is basically the last-ditch effort of Tesla bears to drive the stock down. Once the next two quarters financials are in, there will be no case for shorting Tesla stock whatsoever.

    1. Re:Shorts are running scared... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Standard practice, genius. Worked for an industrial tool supplier. Different pricing scales for different volumes of orders. They increased their volume that much, they're going to want a better deal.. and we'd give them the better deal if they could maintain their volumes. That not begging... that's leverage. Its what successful companies do in a competitive field. Tesla isn't going to put a dent in pass/fail in Q3 with a few vendors out of many hundreds. There is nothing "special" or "disturbing" about it. If there were Any truth to them "begging" and "scrimping" this would have been a general effort and not limited to a few... and even then, highly dubious. As it stands, only the rubes and speculators fall for this kind of FUD because the former are gullible (and believe the financial news is actually impartial because lying "would be illegal") and the latter can't hold their positions long enough to ride it out.

  2. Re: We are not all "Trolls" or "Shorts". by WindBourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've read MS as well for several years. He has many lies, that he was using to influence the stock market. That is criminal, which is why he kept it anonymous.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  3. My disclosure by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone else made a valid point about disclosing biases, so here is mine: I own Tesla stock, and I'm "long" on it.

    I originally wanted to do some study of the stock market, and I purchased the stock to make the study "valuable" to me.

    That turned out to be a lucky choice because Tesla is the hurricane eye of controversial stock market reporting. It's the perfect test case for deciding whether stock market news reports, statistics, and opinions have any informational value.

    In any event, be aware that I own some shares and have an interest in seeing Tesla succeed.

    1. Re:My disclosure by AlanObject · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've been talking about Tesla for years, and didn't own any Tesla stock until this spring, when Tesla fell down to $263. ...

      I missed the early part of public Tesla trading and had meant to buy, but at the time I was so busy I just forgot about it until it was too late.

      Then the news was all about Telsa Fires! Fires! Every Tesla car ever made is bursting into flame! Remember that?

      The stock tanked for a while and that's when I bought. Never regretted it. Wish I had bought more but I didn't have the cash. But it was an easy decision because the negative hype was just so obvious that it just couldn't control the stock price forever. And it didn't.

      I live in Tesla's neighborhood. My housekeeper's husband works there as a welder. Every day I drive down Kato road. These days it is lined with car-transport trucks either loaded or waiting to be loaded. They have no place to park all the trucks they need and these trucks are parked about 1Km from the plant and that's the closest parking.

      I also talk to their vendors. LIke PCB contract manufacturers and metal shops. Tesla is not well liked in that regard because they are aggressive on price and very demanding. Some local shops turn down their business because if they took it they would use most/all of their capacity on Tesla and pretty much neglect the rest of their customer base. The shops that did take their business are in good times right now and if it lasts it will turn out they made the right decision.

      For now, the forecast is good.

      Tesla could have a force majure type of event or some major disaster that can bring them down, at least for a while. Their (Musk's) cash flow management requires nerves of steel but they seem to be making it work. In spite of the CONSTANT posts I see here about how they are "out of cash" and will have to shut their doors yada yada. Yeah the risk is NOT nonexistent and NOT negligible but the counter to that is very convincing:

      1. Technological leadership.

      2. Market space leadership.

      3. Production leadership.

      4. Big Backlog of Orders.

      Call Musk delusional or badly behaved all you want but the above points are what is driving his stock price.

  4. Re: fuck musk by saloomy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This guy, Montana Skeptic was out in full force trying to down Tesla stock and bolster Oil stocks. He is a manager of a hedge fund. Isn't that manipulating the market? SEC?

  5. Not surprising by owlaf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in 2009/2010 I followed daily why the barrel price would change. I would just use google new searching for oil, barrel price, etc. The articles written for the price change most often than not would have a bs feel like they may not tell the whole story. Once instance the price went fast at the beginning of the day because the oil supplies at the refineries had dropped, then turned right around and dropped below the start of the day due to the fact that the refineries were producing heating oil to be ready for the coming winter, a normal part of the business. About a week later the price went up again because it was report the supply last week dropped, without mentioning the logical reason why. Another instance the price of the barrel was regularly going up because the supplies were decreasing in December. The stated reason was likely because of demand. I finally found an article pointing out there used (not sure if still the case) be inventory tax on oil at the end of December. My better understanding of the market, I see the investors with a clue like how they can predictably make money from oil. That is why some don't like Tesla

  6. Re:fuck musk by rashanon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yea his boss has reminded him of how many SEC violations he made over 3 years, and he left a papertrail on the internet with his Twitter account. Deleting it wont help because Twitter archives peoples accounts for a period of time afterwards for legal backtracking. Larry is about to get screwed and his company is about have the shiznit load of fines for violating insider trading rules. Larry might even cop some jail time for being an idiot for that long.

  7. Don't laugh by Cyberax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't laugh, but Congress and the Executive branch are explicitly exempt from the insider trading rules. There's a law stating just that.