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- “The Big Short” investor Michael Burry drew a line between Tesla and GameStop on Wednesday.
- Burry, who is shorting the automaker, flagged its reliance on regulatory credits in a now-deleted tweet.
- The Scion Asset Management boss said shutting down Wall Street Bets would be wrong, and called for short-selling reforms.
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Michael Burry, the investor best known for his starring role in Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short,” dismissed comparisons between Tesla and GameStop and called for short-selling reforms in a flurry of swiftly deleted tweets on Wednesday.
“$TSLA is $GME? How can I not tweet this?” he said, before quoting from a Wall Street Journal article. The story pointed out Tesla’s $270 million in net income last quarter was buoyed by its sale of $401 million in regulatory credits to other automakers.
Burry, who made a fortune betting on the bursting of the US housing bubble, is shorting Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company and expects its stock price to collapse in similar fashion.
The Scion Asset Management boss also waded into the fracas around the Reddit forum Wall Street Bets. Amateur investors have used it to organize mass purchases of heavily shorted stocks, scoring quick profits and squeezing short-sellers such as Melvin Capital.
"#wallstreetbets is down? Not the way to deal with this," Burry tweeted after the subreddit was briefly unavailable and then taken private for a period on Wednesday.
"How about not allowing naked shorting, not allowing shorts @150% of outstanding shares?" he continued. "Putting issue-specific notional limits on option open interest? Real reforms at the broker-dealer? You can't just delete/cancel investors."
Burry has been a major beneficiary of the Wall Street Bets saga, which has boosted GameStop stock by more than 1,900% this month. His hedge fund owned 1.7 million shares at the last count, which have ballooned in value from $17 million at the end of September to $592 million as of Wednesday's close.
Despite his GameStop position, Burry criticized the frenzy around the stock as "unnatural, insane, and dangerous" in a Tuesday tweet.