The short interest in electric carmaker Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is rising to almost a third of the float, the managing director for Predictive Analytics at S3 Partners, Ihor Dusaniwsky, said.
Short interest in the stock is now worth US$10.595bn and that 35.43mln shares have been shorted, which accounts for 27.79% of the float, he said in a tweet.
$TSLA short interest is $10.595 billion, 35.43 million shares shorted, 27.79% of float. Shares shorted are up 743k shares over the last week. Previous chart was not updated. pic.twitter.com/L8kthRAVls
— Ihor Dusaniwsky (@ihors3) September 20, 2018
According to data from Yahoo Finance, Tesla's outstanding shares stood at 170.59mln and the float is at 127.52mln. Shares that were short as of July 30, 2018, reached 34.99mln shares.
Tesla was plunged into controversy last month over the aborted plan by CEO Elon Musk to take the company private.
READ: Tesla faces criminal probe by US over Elon Musk's statements on aborted go-private plan - Bloomberg
The US SEC and the Justice Department is now investigating Musk and Tesla to see if they misled investors, looking especially at the claim by Musk that funding had been secured for the plan.
Eventually, it was found that the funding was not available for the go-private proposal.