It does actually happen occasionally that a short seller will bet against the stock of a company and then do something to sabotage the company. There’s that guy who shorted the stock of Borussia Dortmund, the soccer team, and allegedly planted a bomb on the team’s bus. That’s sabotage!

And then there are more metaphorical (and legal) forms of sabotage; Bill Ackman shorted Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. and then spent years pestering regulators to investigate it for being a pyramid scheme. That’s not a bomb, but it is definitely a committed effort to disrupt the company’s operations.

But the vast majority of the time, when a public-company CEO complains that short sellers are sabotaging his company, he is talking nonsense. In general, the short sellers’ thesis is that the company is bad and that eventually the market will find out, not that it is good but they can ruin it. Of course, yes, sure, fine, short sellers have a theoretical economic incentive to publish the company’s trade secrets and blow up its factories and murder its workers.

But they generally don’t, because we live in a society with laws, and those things are crimes. Muddy Waters Research once shorted a medical-device company because it claimed that it was possible to hack into the company’s pacemakers and murder their users. But it didn’t actually murder them!

Elon Musk has been banging on for ages about how short sellers are trying to sabotage his company, Tesla Inc. When he got mad at journalist Linette Lopez, he asked her “Is it possible you’re serving as an inside trading source for one of Tesla’s biggest short-sellers,” an accusation that was not only unsupported but that also made no sense.

When a whistle-blower/saboteur took sensitive data from Tesla, Musk guessed without evidence that short sellers might be to blame, and put them on his “long list of organisations that want Tesla to die”. Part of his rationale for trying to take the company private was to get rid of short sellers: “As the most shorted stock in the history of the stock market, being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company.”

This does seem to be mostly nonsense. If you build lots of good cars and sell them for more money than it costs you to build them, then you will make a lot of money and no amount of desperate pushing of narrative will result in your destruction. If your company is actually good, then it just doesn’t matter that much if some hedge funds say that it is bad.

Just do the work and let your results speak for themselves. There is as far as I can tell no evidence that short sellers are, like, breaking into the factory and loosening screws in the cars. The short sellers aren’t even bad for the stock price: “Shorts only depress a share price when they sell,” as Felix Salmon pointed out, and Tesla’s exchange-reported short interest peaked back in April.

Still, if you look at the last two weeks in the life of Tesla, you could reasonably conclude that short sellers are trying to sabotage Tesla, and that it’s working. It’s just that the weak link they’re targeting for sabotage is not Tesla’s intellectual property, or its assembly line, or its financing sources, or its “narrative”. They’re targeting the CEO.

Meanwhile, everyone seems to have stopped pretending that Musk might take Tesla private. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which was the source of Musk’s supposedly secure financing, has never made any public comment on the buyout plan that it is allegedly backing, and “people familiar with the matter” are sceptical the fund has any serious plans to take a sizeable stake in Tesla beyond the nearly 5 per cent it recently bought.

Speculation about how Tesla could “go private” while still letting “all shareholders have a choice” to remain shareholders in the private company has mostly stopped, as people have realised those were just words Musk wrote and not a description of any actual plan or worked-out deal structure. The deal’s apparent requirement that most of Tesla’s big shareholders — many of them public-market-focused institutional investors like T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Vanguard and BlackRock — roll their stock into the new private company (because there’s no money to actually buy them out) has been undermined by the fact that T. Rowe and Fidelity have been selling Tesla stock.

The whole conversation has shifted from “well, it’s a long shot but Musk is good at long shots” to questions of damage control: Did Musk at least have some reasonable basis for saying “funding secured”, even if he doesn’t actually have any funding? Is there some sort of gesture at a deal that he could put together, and have the board or the shareholders reject, in order to save face?

Was his intention to be transparent about his plans, or to manipulate the stock and burn the shorts? Does his fragile emotional state mitigate any claims of stock manipulation? Was he at least not using drugs while tweeting about going private?

What do you do with this? If Musk were just a bumbling idiot who kept damaging his company with his tweets, the answer would be easy: Get rid of him to save the company. But I doubt even his harshest detractors believe that. It seems more plausible that Musk is a visionary leader with an impressive track record of accomplishing difficult things, who, amid all his distractions, makes good cars.

And who keeps damaging his company with his tweets.

You need to solve one of these problems. It seems to me that two of them are very hard: It is very hard to replace the visionary who built Tesla up from nothing into a much-admired $50 billion (Dh183.62 billion) car company, and it is very hard to take a money-losing company private for $70 billion without any cash.

Lots of people are perfectly adequate public-company CEOs, and many of them are far less impressive than Musk. It is not rocket science. You get some independent non-crony directors on the board, you give them some power to constrain Musk, and you sit him down and explain to him that, if he wants Tesla to succeed, his job is not only (not at all?) to work 24-hour shifts in the factory but also to be a responsible public face of the company.

He is a smart guy; presumably someone could explain to him that running material announcements by the board, and having a lawyer review them to make sure that they’re true, are not wasteful bureaucratic distractions but rather ways to prevent distractions and drama. And take away his Twitter!