Desperation breeds strange bedfellows. Fear and greed affect human behavior in the real world. It's not always rational but that is not particularly significant in this context.
There are a number of principles at play here that can lead to a desire to keep TSLA down.
TSLA share price is a powerful symbol. It can signal "success" and success can breed more success (people defecting from ICE to EV). The people who want to harm TSLA think it is a delicate phenomenon that can be slowed (or even snuffed out) by taking the halo away. Never mind that it's a wrong-headed notion. They view the desire to get into an EV as somewhat faddish and want the popularity of the movement to stall sooner than they think it will if they don't expose the fad for what it is. They never believed the EV movement had real "legs", at least not in the near-term timeframe.
Anything that that can potentially slow down the transition to EV's means billions in lost oil sales delayed to a later date. That means more profit now for big oil who has always found it important to focus on earning of the next quarter and the rest of the year. A smallish drop in demand has an outsized drop in oil price. And a moderate drop in oil price has an outsized effect on profits. It's a cascading series of impacts they believe needs to slowed down at the source. Money matters.
Anything that can slow down the transition to EV's gives multi-billion dollar dealership franchises as well as smaller mom-n-pop dealerships more time to prepare for an all-EV world. It potentially gives legacy auto manufacturing time to "catch up" to the leader. High prices for F and GM are good at giving this illusion legitimacy as much as a lower share price for TSLA helps stem the bleeding. Never mind that these are wrong-headed analyses, perceptions matter.
TSLA share price is not behaving as market makers expected, it is supposed to come back to 'reality'. As it continues to climb, it increasingly threatens billions of dollars of long-term options that are not fully hedged for prices on the high side. They can see strong TSLA earning do not bode well for their own "max pain" (which is the opposite of what we think of as "max pain"). TSLA share price action has not fit the predictive models based upon hundreds of previous high-flyers. This matters to their performance as market-makers in options markets and keeping TSLA share price in check can potentially help prevent TSLA from becoming an even more popular bull phenomenon. Anyone who thinks this doesn't matter needs to get their head examined.
TSLA success makes many people very unhappy. You can bet your sweet bottom this affects people's behavior across the board. I've long known that the share price of any given company is largely a reflection of public perceptions of that company. All stocks are ultimately valued by humans who make decisions based upon the entire body of perceptions around that company. Damage those perceptions, damage the share price. And damage the share price, damage the perception of that company. The two are inseparable.
Let's leave the naivety where it belongs, in the circular file with all the other unsupported conventional thinking based on nothing more than the misguided belief that the world is fair and just and not impacted by greed or bad actors.
