Go ahead and boycott Tesla. I suspect you were basically already doing that, despite deciding to call yourself "TeslaInvestor" here.
Montana Skeptic AKA Lawerence Fossi has written 137 pieces on Tesla over the past several years explaining why he shorts it, and has been on Twitter over that same period posting his thoughts there as well. His works and postings were generally not especially offensive, especially in comparison with some other short-TSLA personalities. So, why did Musk call his boss today? I suspect it has everything to do with
bullying Dan Neil off Twitter because he dared give a favorable review. Now, I suspect Dan deleted his account because he doesn't need the hassle of dozens of notifications over the period of a couple days to see that people, mainly Fossi and Spiegel, were being jerks, impugning his credibility with wild accusations. Musk, who came to respect Dan because he bet him in August of 2011 that the Model S wouldn't ship before the end of 2012. It did, and Dan paid him $1,000 (to a charity). They aren't close friends. They don't hang out. I guess Musk learned about what happened and it ticked him off enough to make a phone call.
Anyway. Whatever. Rahr, Fossi's presumed boss (I'm not certain of the exact nature of the relationship. Rahr could just be a very important client of Fossi), could easily have told Musk to take a hike, and maybe he did. It wasn't a "disgrace to freedom of speech" because there is no right to freedom of speech outside of a citizen's relationship with the government. The government is not allowed to deprive people of their speech rights, but private platforms certainly can, and employees can be held responsible by employers for certain speech.
What I suspect actually happened was, Rahr was made aware of the whole Fossi/Tesla thing. The amount of time Fossi poured into this effort was astounding, considering he manages the $1 billion Rahr Foundation portfolio. Maybe Rahr thought he was neglecting his actual job with his short-Tesla role and told him to cut it out. Maybe, though less likely because he still appears to have the job/account, he used the Foundations money to short the stock as well. As we can see by Fossi's Seeking Alpha rating, his investment decisions were as successful as a coin flip at 50% and he actually lost -6.5% or so on his trades. One would think someone so knowledgeable about the company could do a little better than that. (By contrast, Galileo Russel, who is somewhat overly enthusiastic about the stock is up 20% on his trades -- I only know this because I was tasked with a post about the two, so I had to hold my nose and actually go to Seeking Alpha).
Now, Musk does not like Tesla shorts. Maybe no kind of short. Seems like he thinks it's not legit because it's not actually investing in a companies success, but betting against a company. I get it, but whatever. Short positions are a thing that isn't going away and there's not anything Musk can do about them in general or the short Tesla ones in particular (outside of successfully executing which should drive up TSLA). So he called up some jerk's boss. Big deal. It's one situation where he had some room to act, that may or may not have been successful. It's not like he can do this to other shorts, most of whom hide in anonymity.
I'm not sure why he should stop tweeting out links to positive news about his efforts. It's kind of what anyone in his position would do. Personally, I can't stand that he tweets out Electrek's links, but that's neither here nor there.
Finally, Zero Hedge is garbage.
Now he has called up Montana Skeptic's boss to silence his dissenting voice.
