Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$232 billion as of December 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $254 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.
James Steven Chanos is an American investment manager. He is president and founder of Kynikos Associates, a New York City registered investment advisor focused on short selling. A noted art collector, he appeared on the BBC Four documentary The Banker's Guide to Art.
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas, which designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
Patrick Michael Byrne is an American businessman and conspiracy theorist. In 1999, Byrne launched Overstock.com after leading two smaller companies. Byrne led Overstock as chief executive officer for two decades, from 1999 to 2019. In 2002, Byrne took Overstock public. Early in his tenure he attracted public attention for a long-running legal battle against short sellers and "naked short selling." He eventually resigned as CEO in August 2019, following revelations that he had been in an intimate relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina.
Wirecard AG is an insolvent German payment processor and financial services provider whose former CEO, COO, two board members, and other executives have been arrested or otherwise implicated in criminal proceedings. In June 2020, the company announced that €1.9 billion in cash was missing. It owed €3.2 billion in debt. In November 2020, the company was dismantled after it sold the assets of its main business unit to Santander Bank for €100 million. Other assets, including its North American, UK and Brazilian units had been previously sold at nondisclosed prices. The company offered electronic payment transaction services and risk management, and issued and processed physical and virtual cards. As of 2017, the company was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and was a part of the DAX stock index from September 2018 to August 2020.
Michael James Burry is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, which he ran from 2000 until 2008 before closing it to focus on his personal investments. He is best known for being among the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010.
Payoneer Global Inc. is an American financial services company that provides online money transfer, digital payment services and provides customers with working capital.
Andrew Edward Left is an activist, short seller, author and editor of the online investment newsletter Citron Research, formerly StockLemon.com. Under the name Citron Research, Left publishes reports on firms that he claims are overvalued or are engaged in fraud. Left is known for advising investors on short selling and has often appeared on various media outlets such as CNBC and Bloomberg to talk about his opinions on stocks. In 2017, Left was called 'The Bounty Hunter of Wall Street' by The New York Times. Left gained further notoriety following his announced short of GameStop, precipitating a short squeeze that has hurt him and other short sellers in the short term.
Muddy Waters Research LLC is an American privately held due diligence based investment firm that conducts investigative research on public companies while also taking investment positions that reflect their research. It has exposed accounting problems and fraud at several companies, primarily in China but also in other countries in Asia, Europe and North America.
Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is an American law firm headquartered in San Diego, California. It is a plaintiffs law firm specializing in securities litigation and shareholder rights cases.
Nikola Corporation is an American manufacturer of heavy-duty commercial battery-electric vehicles, fuel-cell electric vehicles, and energy solutions. It presented several vehicle concept vehicles from 2016 to 2020, the first of which was a natural gas fueled turbine-electric semi truck. The company went public on June 4, 2020. In February 2022, the company projected deliveries of between 300 and 500 of its first battery-electric semitrucks — known as the Nikola Tre — to customers. The company delivered its first two battery-electric trucks in December 2021. Like Tesla, Inc., the company is named in honor of Nikola Tesla, but these are not related to the inventor. Nikola Corporation is based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Alexander Benjamin Spiro is an American attorney. He is a partner at the New York office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
TSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), establishes the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ in July 2018 to be the doxxing by a Twitter user of Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller who uses the pseudonym Montana Skeptic.
Lordstown Motors Corporation (LMC) was an American electric vehicle automaker located in Lordstown, Ohio. The company was based at the Lordstown Assembly plant, previously a General Motors factory. Lordstown Motors was known for their Lordstown Endurance electric pickup truck.
The Wirecard scandal was a series of corrupt business practices and fraudulent financial reporting that led to the insolvency of Wirecard, a payment processor and financial services provider, headquartered in Munich, Germany. The company was part of the DAX index. They offered customers electronic payment transaction and risk management services, as well as the issuance and processing of physical cards. The subsidiary, Wirecard Bank AG, held a banking license and had contracts with multiple international financial services companies.
Tesla, Inc. has been criticized for its cars, workplace culture, business practices, and occupational safety. Many of the criticisms are also directed toward Elon Musk, the company's CEO and Product Architect. Critics have also accused Tesla of deceptive marketing, unfulfilled promises, and fraud. The company is currently facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. Critics have highlighted Tesla's downplaying of issues, and Tesla's alleged retaliation against several whistleblowers.
Hindenburg Research LLC is a U.S. investment research firm with a focus on activist short-selling founded by Nathan Anderson in 2017. Named after the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, which they characterize as a human-made avoidable disaster, the firm generates public reports via its website that allege corporate fraud and malfeasance. Companies that have been the subjects of their reports include Adani Group, Nikola, Clover Health, Block, Inc., Kandi, and Lordstown Motors. These reports also feature defenses of the practice of short-selling and explanations of how short-sells can "play a critical role in exposing fraud and protecting investors."
Dark Basin is a hack-for-hire group, discovered in 2017 by Citizen Lab. They are suspected to have acted on the behalf of companies such as Wirecard and ExxonMobil.
ADLER Real Estate AG is a listed real estate company in Germany, formerly based in Luxembourg. The main activities are the purchase and management of residential real estate all over Germany. The company owned about 52.000 residential units in 2020.
Mandla Lamba is a South African scammer, known for having acquired a fake reputation as the country's "youngest billionaire" and a successful mining tycoon before being exposed. He was arrested on fraud and homicide charges in May 2011 and was imprisoned before becoming active again in 2021 following his release from jail.
