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Elon Musk says he'll go bankrupt if Tesla, SpaceX do

Evie Fordham

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Sunday that if his companies Tesla and SpaceX go down, he'll go down with them.

"Just looked at my wiki for 1st time in years. It’s insane! [By the way], can someone please delete 'investor'. I do basically zero investing," Musk wrote on Twitter.

"If Tesla [and] SpaceX go bankrupt, so will I. As it should be," he wrote.

Tesla has a multibillion-dollar market capitalization today, but Musk went broke before becoming a billionaire. He got $180 million for his role in Paypal when eBay bought the platform but hit rock bottom before Tesla's stock market debut in 2010, Business Insider reported.

Musk is known for his diverse and futuristic companies like SpaceX, which will send hemp into space in early 2020 to study the effects of microgravity on the plant. He's also known for not holding back on his social media, something that's gotten him into trouble with the SEC.

He recently took aim at short sellers, who have been betting against Tesla stock for some time now.

"Bravo, right thing to do! Short selling should be illegal," Musk tweeted early Tuesday in response to a Financial Times story about Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund, the largest in the world, announcing it will no longer allow stock lending from its $390 billion foreign equities portfolio for short selling.

Short sellers rely on borrowing shares to make bets their stock price will fall. They have long targeted Tesla shares and currently have a $9.508 billion bet against the electric-car maker, according to data from the financial analytics firm S3 Partners. The 28.39 million shares shorted amount to 21.22 percent of total shares outstanding, S3 said.

FOX Business' Jonathan Garber contributed to this report.

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