Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Friday that Bill Gates “still has a massive short position against Tesla,” reviving a four-year dispute over the Microsoft co-founder’s bet against the EV maker’s shares.
“No kidding, wow. Gates is funding people who attack me. He still has a massive short position against Tesla,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk was replying to a post by Katie Miller, who wrote that the Gates Foundation “is one of Kara Swisher’s major sponsors of her podcast” and that this made it “ever more clear why she is targeting” Musk. Swisher, a technology journalist and podcast host, has been in a public dispute with Musk this week.
Musk did not provide evidence that the short position remains open.
Gates has not said publicly whether he has closed the position since it surfaced in 2022.
Tesla shares were down 2.2% at $394.50 in afternoon trading on Friday, as the Nasdaq Composite fell about 3%. The stock is down 12.3% this year from $449.72 at the end of 2025.
How the Short Became Public
The bet first came to light on April 22, 2022, screenshots of a text exchange between the two men circulated on social media.
“Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?” Musk asked in the messages. “Sorry to say I haven’t closed it out. I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities,” Gates replied.
“Sorry, I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change,” Musk wrote back.
Musk confirmed the exchange on April 23, 2022. “Yeah, but I didn’t leak it to NYT. They must have got it through friends of friends,” he wrote, adding that he had heard “from multiple people at TED that Gates still had half billion short against Tesla, which is why I asked him.”
Despite Musk’s reference to the New York Times, the newspaper had not reported on the texts at the time.
Musk also posted a picture of Gates that, in Isaacson’s later description, made him “look almost pregnant.” He then wrote that he was moving on “from making fun of Gates for shorting Tesla while claiming to support climate change action.”
A month later, Musk said the position had grown. “Since Gates still has a multi-billion dollar short position against Tesla while claiming to help with global warming, I guess I have some trust issues with him too,” he wrote on May 28, 2022.
Gates’ Account in the Biography
Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk, published on September 12, 2023, gave the fullest account of the dispute.
“Hey, I’d love to come see you and talk about philanthropy and climate,” Gates texted Musk in 2022, according to the book, as reported by CNN, which obtained an early copy. Musk had set up a $5.7 billion charitable fund at the time, mostly for tax reasons, Isaacson wrote.
Gates flew to Austin, Texas, on March 9, 2022, to tour Tesla’s Gigafactory. “Just landed,” Gates texted. “Cool,” Musk replied.
During the tour, Gates questioned whether batteries could power large semi trucks and whether solar energy would be part of solving climate change, according to the book. He also told Musk he was too “overboard on Mars,” calling the idea of saving humanity by moving people there “bizarre thinking.”
As the tour neared its end, Gates turned to philanthropy. Musk told him most philanthropy was “bulls—,” estimating that only 20 cents of each dollar made a difference, and said Gates could “do more good for climate change by investing in Tesla,” Isaacson wrote.
Musk then asked about the short. Gates had bet against Tesla and “turned out to be wrong,” Isaacson wrote in an excerpt published by CNBC.
“By the time he arrived in Austin, he had lost $1.5 billion. Musk had heard about it and was seething. Short-sellers occupied his innermost circle of hell,” the excerpt says.
“I apologized to him,” Gates told Isaacson. Gates said he had calculated that electric car supply would outpace demand and push prices down, according to the excerpt, and that he had shorted the stock because he thought he could make money doing so, according to CNN‘s account.
Gates then pitched “five projects of a hundred million each,” covering refugees, American schools, an AIDS cure, eradicating some mosquito species with gene drives and climate-resistant seeds.
The exchange that later leaked came in mid-April, after Gates sent Musk a paper on philanthropy options. Gates read Musk’s question about the short in the dining room of the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, D.C., where his son Rory advised him to “just say yes, and then change the subject quickly,” Isaacson wrote.
“It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?” Musk told Isaacson.
“Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me,” Gates told Isaacson. “But he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”
Musk later texted Isaacson that he was “convinced that he is categorically insane,” the book says.
The day before the book came out, Musk posted that Gates had “placed a massive bet on Tesla dying when our company was at one of its weakest moments several years ago.”
“To the best of my knowledge, Gates still has that massive bet against Tesla on the table. Someone should ask him if he does,” Musk wrote, accusing Gates of “aiming to make $500M from Tesla’s demise.”
What Gates Has Said
Gates has largely declined to discuss the trade. “I don’t talk about my investments but I think he should be very proud of what he’s done,” he said in a CNBC interview before the texts became public.
In a Bloomberg interview in February 2021, he said he wished he had “been more on the long side” of Tesla, CNBC reported.
His most direct answer came two weeks after the texts surfaced. Asked by the BBC in May 2022 whether he had bet against Tesla, Gates said: “That has nothing to do with climate change. I have ways of diversifying.”
“The popularity of electric cars will lead to more competition for selling those cars,” he added. “So there’s a difference between electric cars being adopted, and companies becoming infinitely valuable,” according to Fortune.
In a June 2022 interview with French YouTube channel HugoDécrypte, Gates said, “Somebody shorting his stock doesn’t slow him down or hurt him in any way,” and called Tesla’s cars “great,” according to Benzinga.
Gates later softened his tone. At a dinner later in 2022, he said “there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has,” according to Isaacson.
Asked about Musk in February 2025, before the release of his memoir Source Code, Gates told The Independent: “He’s been nice to me at times, and mean to me at times. I will try and work with him because he’s brilliant, he’s rich, he’s influential.”
Musk’s Running Count
Musk has returned to the short repeatedly as Tesla’s stock has risen.
“Once Tesla fully solves autonomy and has Optimus in volume production, anyone still holding a short position will be obliterated. Even Gates,” he wrote on July 2, 2024.
On December 10, 2024, he posted: “If Tesla does become the world’s most valuable company by far, that short position will bankrupt even Bill Gates.”
In November 2025, after the Gates Foundation disclosed it had sold most of its Microsoft shares, Musk told Gates to exit what he called a “crazy short position” held “for ~8 years.”
A month later, as Tesla hit a record, he said the bet was “~1% of our total shares” and “might have cost him over $10B by now.” Tesla’s record close is $489.88, set on December 16, 2025.
In February, Musk went further. “Epstein went on a massive campaign to short Tesla and got Gates to short 1% of Tesla stock when the market cap was $40B. As far as I know, Gates still has the short open,” he wrote on February 16, without providing evidence**, in a post Musk framed as a response to Epstein being “ghosted”**.
He has also attacked Gates’ judgment on EV trucks, the same doubt Gates raised during the 2022 factory tour. In September, Musk said Gates had told him “experts tell me a long range electric semi truck is impossible” and had declined an offer to test a Tesla Semi.
Figures That Do Not Add Up
Musk’s numbers have shifted over four years, from “half billion” in April 2022 to “multi-billion” a month later and “over $10B” in December 2025.
They are not easy to reconcile. Musk’s account of a 1% short at a $40 billion market value implies a position of about $400 million when opened, close to the “half billion” he first cited.
Tesla was valued near $40 billion in early 2017 and again for stretches of 2019, based on its share counts in SEC filings and Yahoo Finance prices. A 1% short at those levels would have covered about 24 million to 26 million shares on a split-adjusted basis, at roughly $15 to $16.50 each.
Held unchanged, such a position would have lost about $6.5 billion to $7.0 billion by March 9, 2022, the day of the Austin meeting. That is more than four times the $1.5 billion loss Isaacson reported for that date.
On the same assumptions, the paper loss at Friday’s price would be about $9.2 billion to $9.8 billion before borrowing costs, close to the “over $10B” Musk cited in December.
The two accounts cannot both be right unless the position’s size or timing differed from Musk’s description. Whether Gates ever added to, trimmed or closed it is not public.
Securities filings would not settle the question. The SEC’s Form 13F guidance tells institutional managers they “should not include short positions” in those quarterly reports.
Tesla’s shares have risen about 18% since the texts surfaced in April 2022, on a split-adjusted basis, and 37.8% since the day of the Austin meeting. They are 19.5% below the December 2025 record close.
Tesla had 3,952,757,946 shares outstanding as of October 15, according to its latest quarterly filing, valuing it at about $1.56 trillion at Friday’s price.
A Broader Feud
The dispute has widened beyond Tesla. In May 2025, Gates criticized cuts to US foreign aid made by the Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk then led.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times.
Musk replied on May 8, 2025, to a post quoting Gates as saying the Department of Government Efficiency would cost 2 million lives. “Gates is a huge liar,” he wrote.
Friday’s post ties the short to a new front. Musk did not say how Gates was funding his critics beyond agreeing with Miller’s post about Swisher’s podcast.
