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Elon Musk Should Be Held In Contempt For Tweet, SEC Tells Judge (fastcompany.com)
The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked a federal judge to hold CEO Elon Musk in contempt for breaking terms of a settlement agreement with a tweet. The SEC cited an "inaccurate" February 19 tweet about production. Musk tweeted alongside a photo: "4000 Tesla cars loading in SF for Europe." He replied to the tweet adding: "Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019." Fast Company reports: It's that "will make around 500K in 2019" part that angered the SEC, which had this to say in legal papers filed with a Manhattan federal court: "He once again published inaccurate and material information about Tesla to his over 24 million Twitter followers, including members of the press, and made this inaccurate information available to anyone with Internet access." The SEC says the tweet violated an agreement that was part of a settlement Tesla made with the regulator last year. Musk promised to consult with Tesla's board before he made any statements on social media that could affect the stock price of the company. Tesla also agreed to pay $40 million in penalties and Musk agreed to step down as chairman of the board.
You're confusing options with delta 1 instruments. If someone was betting that the stock price would collapse, the easiest way to make a profit on it (i.e. requiring least initial outlay, margin and maintenance) is to buy a put option. You do that, and if the price falls below the strike price you make some money. If it doesn't fall below the strike price, you just lose the premium you paid for the option. No need to sweat bullets - you've already paid, you're not up for any other losses.
Now if you want to post a bit more margin, you can write a call option. In this case, you're paid the premium, and if the stock ends above the strike price, you pay the difference. In this case you want to hope that the premium you got when you wrote the option is going to be bigger than the difference between the stock price and the strike price at expiry. But if you're writing options without delta hedging, you're basically gambling, so if you lose you got what was coming to you.
If you want a short delta 1 instrument, the lowest initial outlay is a contract for differences (CFD). With this you get a delta 1 position, but you pay maintenance each month. The stock price needs to fall at rate faster than the maintenance you're paying on your CFD position. You're not going to be shitting bricks in this case either. You've been paying the whole time you've had your position open, and if the stock price isn't falling fast enough you just swallow the loss so far and close the position.
Actual short stock positions require an arrangement with a security lender if you want to hold them for more than a day. The lender is going to charge you maintenance on the position and require you to post margin. So as with the CFD, you'd cut your losses at some point if the stock price isn't falling as fast as you'd like.
I'm not going to try and give an overview of futures here, but as with the other delta 1 strategies there's no strike price involved. The only people who'd be shitting bricks would be people who wrote deep in-the-money calls and didn't hedge their positions. But they should've known what they were getting into.