Elon Musk has said again that Bill Gates, the father of Microsoft, may have lost more than $10 billion by betting against Tesla. A post on X (formerly Twitter) said, “If Bill Gates hadn’t listened to Warren Buffett and hadn’t sold his Microsoft shares to diversify, he would be the world’s first trillionaire, worth twice as much as Elon.”
The tech billionaire responded to the post. Musk answered, “Bill Gates made a huge short bet against Tesla of about 1% of all our shares, which could have cost him over $10B by now.”
From 1995 to 2010, and again from 2013 to 2017, Gates was the richest person in the world. Forbes’ list of the world’s millionaires for 2025 puts Bill Gates at number 18 with a net worth of $103.8 billion, down about $24 billion from the previous year.
In 2022, Gates admitted that he had a short position against Elon Musk’s Tesla, which made things worse between the two millionaires in the eyes of the public. Musk has said bad things about the bet many times. In defense of his short position against Tesla, Gates said that his investment choices are not personal and are part of bigger financial plans.
What is the short pose?
When someone invests, they “short” a stock, which means they think its value will go down. Someone borrows shares, sells them at the current price, and then comes back and buys them back to repay the loan. If the price goes down, the owner gets money because they can buy back the shares for less. If the price goes up, the owner has to pay more to get them back, which means they lose money. A short trade is basically a bet that the company’s price will go down.
When Elon Musk said that Bill Gates would go bankrupt if…
As we already said, this is not the first time Musk has pointed out Gates’ short bet against Tesla. In December 2024, the CEO of Tesla wrote that if the company became the most valuable in the world, Bill Gates could lose all of his money.
“If Tesla does become by far the most valuable company in the world, that short position will put even Bill Gates out of business,” he said.
Musk wrote in an old post from September 12 that “Taking a short position against Tesla, like Gates did, only pays off if a company goes bankrupt!” Gates bet a lot of money that Tesla would fail when our company was at its weakest a few years ago. Many people who are short on the company also see it go down because of this.
He went on to say, “As far as I know, Gates is still wagering that huge amount of money against Tesla.” It would be smart to ask him if he does. Gates’s lack of self-awareness and arrogance when he asked me to give to his mostly empty environmental causes while also planning to make $500 million from Tesla’s end.
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