But we have seen on many occasions that the S3 short interest data for TSLA was BS. For example on January 4th they said:
But then the actual information came out and showed it was really ~60.62M shares on 12/31. So they were off by ~16.4 million shares. That seems pretty much like BS to me.
Indeed. Plus we have observed several occasions when the error was not only in quantity, but even completely wrong directions, e.g. S3 was reported significant short covering numbers, but then it turned out short interest actually grew by quite a bit, and there were also opposite cases (S3 reporting more shorting when they actually covered). Several people on the main thread have pointed out those misses and concluded that S3 data is no better than random guess.