My impression is that many Tesla shorts had covered to book profit on the way down from high 300s which I'm pretty sure they would count as a "win". Short inter

My impression is that many Tesla shorts had covered to book profit on the way down from high 300s which I'm pretty sure they would count as a "win". Short interest has declined since earlier in the year. Positive Q3 was widely expected. Citron Research (one of the more well-known Tesla shorts) was among those who saw this coming and publicly not only took profits on their short position but moved into a long position ahead of earnings. The scale of the positive FCF is however a big shock. It's not clear at this point how much of this was "real" and how much short-term timing or one-off factors. As a big part of the short case was/is a short-term free cashflow/need for funds story, I'm sure this will be picked over in some detail over the next few days. The longer-term bear case is simply about relative value and harder to assail with one good quarter. Difficult to take a short position on that basis though.