Billionaire hedge funder David Einhorn blasts Tesla again, calling Elon Musk's comments 'a lot of horse s---'
- David Einhorn blasted Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a hedge fund conference in New York on Monday.
- The billionaire presented a slideshow of Musk's comments as part of a "trains, planes, and automobiles," pitch.
- After showing examples of Musk's previous comments about Tesla, Reuters reported, Einhorn said that's "a lot of horses---."
David Einhorn had more blunt criticism of Elon Musk and Tesla on Monday.
At the Sohn Investment Conference in New York, the Greenlight Capital CEO's pitch on the theme of "trains, planes, and automobiles" began with a slide show of Musk's comments about Tesla, according to Reuters, and ended with a remark that Musk's words are "a lot of horse s---."
Read more: Elon Musk loves to make grandiose promises. Here are 8 he failed to deliver on.
Einhorn has been critical of Tesla for some time, thanking the stock's 7% decline in the first quarter for helping his hedge fund achieve an 11% return for the same period, according to a letter to clients seen by Business Insider's Bradley Saacks. By comparison, the S&P 500 benchmark index is up about 14% in the first three months of 2019.
"The signs are everywhere, from the lack of demand, desperate price cutting, layoffs, closing-and-then-not-closing stores, closing service centers, cutting capex, rushed product announcements and a new effort to distract investors from the demand problem with hyperbole over TSLA's autonomous driving capabilities," the letter said.
"TSLA has lost a significant number of senior executives and appears to be having a hard time recruiting replacements. After all, who would want to work in such an environment?"
Short sellers like Einhorn are one of Musk's most hated group of investors. "These guys want us to die so bad they can taste it," Musk tweeted of the investors betting against Tesla's stock price in 2017 to the extent that it's routinely among the most heavily shorted in the US stock market.
His disdain has also spurred an amateur movement of Tesla cynics who have banded together under the tag $tslaq on Twitter, with the appended letter referring to what happens to a company's ticker when it files for bankruptcy.
More from Sohn 2019:
- Meet the 5 rising stars presenting their investment ideas at the world's highest-profile hedge-fund conference
- David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital is bouncing back from a disastrous 2018 thanks to its bet against Tesla, where it says 'the wheels are falling off'
- Some of the world's largest investors are making huge bets on companies tied directly to millennials