Gabe Plotkin About his hedge fund

Gabe Plotkin told Congress on Thursday that his hedge fund had already rushed to buy Tesla stock at that time.

Plotkin is the founder of Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that participated in a massive short sale of GameStop stock last month. Melvin Capital suffered a 53 percent loss in January, prompting Ken Griffin of Citadel and Steve Cohen of Point72 to invest about $3 billion.

Plotkin asked the question at the request of Congressman Steve Stivers, who was concerned about Elon Musk’s tweet about GameStop in late January.

‘We’ve accelerated Tesla’s promotion to this point,’ Gabe Plotkin said.

During the GameStop short sale last month, Elon Musk said, “Gamestonk!!!”. in a tweet. with a hyperlink to Reddit’s “WallStreetBets” discussion board. Thanks to that tweet, GameStop’s stock rose 157 percent the next day.

“Do you think this tweet was directed at you because you were a seller of Tesla stock?” Mr. Stivers asked Mr. Gabe Plotkin.

Mr. Musk has made it clear that he despises short sellers, and he has condemned them before. Musk shorted Red Satin last year, taking advantage of the good old days when Tesla’s stock price was rising. Up until then, Tesla stock had been severely undervalued, which may have annoyed Musk.

Plotkin did not answer Stivers’ question, but said, “I’ve had a very small, quick position in Tesla over the last couple of years. As for his motives for posting the tweet, we can probably only speculate: Plotkin, special investor Keith Gill, and executives from Robinhood, Reddit and Citadel testified before Congress on Thursday about the GameStop short sale. …

He spent a year at Griffin’s Citadel and joined Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors soon after. He made enough money during his career to buy a stake in a qualified Charlotte Hornets basketball team and last year paid about $44 million for two adjacent properties overlooking Miami’s Biscayne Bay.