How do we know how much Chanos really lost shorting?? Are we trusting what he SAID he did or is it on public record somewhere?Indeed. If you pay attention to what Chanos is saying (no, not the FUD BS "thesis", just the facts about his own TSLA short position and their policy about it) in the two separate interview segments and then connect the dots, you can come to the following conclusions:
Let's see how we arrive to these conclusions:
- Chanos has already covered about 90% of their initial TSLA short position
- They have already lost so much money on TSLA shorting that they can never recover, even if Tesla were to bankrupt tomorrow
TLDR: Chanos has already lost more money than he could ever make back on shorting TSLA and he already covered most (~90%) of his shorts, so his position is rather insignificant now.
- As far as I know from earlier appearances on CNBC etc, Chanos had a "max short" position already around $200 SP.
- In the first segment in the above video from April, Chanos stated they are still "max short" at $470s and explains that is 5% of their fund as that is the max allowed in a single position by their rules
- In the later (this week) segment he explains, they are still short but only within the rules of their fund, explains when the price hikes up they must trim their position to stay within the 5%.
- So, if they shorted ~$200 and now the price is over $2000 and they keep trimming to stay within 5%, that means they already had to cover over 90% of their short!
- That covering just from the 400s to now required them to pay more than twice the price for 80% of the position between 400-2000, therefore they had to lose more than 1.6x the money they got from the short sale. So even if Tesla goes bankrupt and they can cover their remaining 10% shorts at zero cost, they are still forever deep in the red!
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