It's in a short seller's interest to get a company negatively in the media. This means that they will actively hunt for morally/legally/financially objectionabl

It's in a short seller's interest to get a company negatively in the media. This means that they will actively hunt for morally/legally/financially objectionable stunts a company might pull and leak it to journalists. There's a lot of fun Matt Levine articles on Bloomberg about this dynamic. Eg from https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-29/you-can-pay-credit-suisse-not-to-work-there https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-29/you-ca... (https://outline.com/atF74W https://outline.com/atF74W): > The thing about inflating your revenue by pretending that you sold more coffee than you did is that people can go to your stores and watch you sell coffee. It is a reasonable bet that they won’t do that, because it’s incredibly boring. “Who is going to send 1,500 people to our stores to watch us sell coffee all day, count how much we sell and compare it to our financial statements,” Luckin could reasonably have thought. But the answer was “short sellers”! They actually hired people to sit around watching the coffee get made, so they caught the fraud. I also warmly recommend his "Everything is securities fraud" rant that follows this paragraph. (note: I know nothing about stock markets (or reddit or gamestop for that matter) so someone let me know if I'm just a noob eating up some slightly smarter noob's nonsense)