Anonymous Tesla short sellers who fly over its parking lots taking pictures of cars have a new web site
- Tesla short sellers have been gathering and sharing research, including aerial photography, about the automaker's activities on social media platforms, especially Twitter, for months.
- Today a group of the Tesla bears launched a website, Tslaq.org, to share contributors' photos, videos and theories under a creative commons license.
A group of Tesla short sellers launched a site Friday called Tslaq.org to showcase their crowdsourced research tracking the car maker's activities.
Tslaq.org includes aerial photography from the Shorty Air Force, a group of pseudonymous researchers who fly over the company's parking lots and delivery centers to count Tesla's inventory cars.
Other photos on the site come from a group calling themselves the Shorty Ground Force, which takes photos from publicly accessible points near Tesla factories or facilities using smartphone cameras or hobbyist drones.
Some contributors tally up the cars that they can count in the images. Others provide theories about what's observable in the photos when considered along with Tesla's own claims and disclosures.
Tslaq.org makes all the photos and videos featured on the site available under a creative commons license, meaning other independent bloggers or mainstream media outlets don't have to seek permission before re-publishing them.
Tesla declined comment, but the site is likely to annoy Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has recently sparred with short sellers and the media.
Last year, Musk shut up one of his most vocal critics, a short seller who used the handle "Montana Skeptic" on Twitter and wrote bearish analysis of the company on SeekingAlpha. The Tesla CEO reportedly phoned Montana Skeptic's employer and told the blogger he would potentially take legal action in response to his posts.
The Tesla CEO also sounded off on Twitter at mainstream media organizations throughout 2018, and said he plans to start an organization that rates reporters.