Your answer is correct too, but the question originally asked was "what would he have gained from destroying the shorts? I understand that shorts are effectivel

Your answer is correct too, but the question originally asked was "what would he have gained from destroying the shorts? I understand that shorts are effectively a bet that the stock will go down but do they actually damage the company in any way?" The answer is yes, short sellers do damage the company for a variety of reasons, some reasons relating directly to stuff like stock price, and other reasons being more indirect like the one I cited. I saw that other answers had already explained how shorts lower the stock price, but nobody had pointed out the other ways in which they "damage the company", as the original post put it.