Bill Gates may have got the last laugh in his feud with Elon Musk after the soon to be Twitter owner confronted the Microsoft founder over shorting Tesla stock.
Tesla shares have fallen 12.2% over concerns among investors that Musk will sell a chunk of his stake to fund his US$43bn acquisition of Twitter.
As a result, nearly US$126bn was wiped of its market value.
For the time being at least, Gates seems to have had the last laugh after being mocked in a series of tweets by the Tesla chief executive.
Moving on …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 24, 2022
An old and unflattering video of Gates, which was proven to be edited, mysteriously resurfaced at the same time as the two locking horns once again was made public.
Musk’s apparent annoyance with Gates comes after he confirmed in a Twitter conversation with another user that the Microsoft founder was holding a US$500mln short position against Tesla stock.
In a text message conversation that was supposedly leaked to the New York Times, Gates said he hasn’t closed the position yet while offering the opportunity to discuss philanthropy possibilities.
Musk responded by saying he cannot take Gates’ “philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”
This isn’t the first run in that the pair have had.
The South African billionaire seemed to take offence that Gates had purchased an electric Porsche as opposed to a Tesla in 2020.
Gates has repeatedly expressed how impressed he is with Tesla's work, particularly on tackling climate change.
He did say in an interview with the New York Times last year however that Tesla was doing "easy stuff, like passenger cars," and argued more needed to be done to tackle specific industires.