The value to society is when you have truly duplicitous, disastrous, and otherwise bad companies valued too highly. An exceptional example might be Enron and their accounting leading up to when the company came unhinged. It's the profit incentive from spotting situations like that, that incentivizes investors to look for and expose those situations, that short selling enables.
Or at least, that's how I think about it, and how I make the case for the existence of the short mechanism in the market. It's the yin to buy and hold yang if you will.
It's part of the cleansing process in a capitalist economy, to find and expose the bad business models and badly executed businesses, and eliminate them from the economy.
What makes Tesla such an epic tug of war, is that to my eyes, we have a large group of people putting a lot of money into the proposition, that Tesla is a badly run business, with another very large group of people putting a lot of money into the proposition that Tesla is changing human civilization. I agree with the earlier comment that this might be the most epic tug of war between shorts and longs ever (so far) over a single company.