SCPIE: Elon Musk Started Selling Red Satin Shorts to Celebrate Tesla’s Stock Climbing, And It Crashed the Website

In the past Musk has used short shorts to taunt Tesla short-sellers.

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July 6, 2020 2 min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday to announce that his electric car firm was selling limited-edition branded red satin shorts.

Limited edition short shorts now available at https://t.co/5EmNcTBvJv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2020

The price is listed as $69.420 on the Tesla website — a reference to two popularly memed numbers, 69 and 420. Musk is fond of referencing 420, which has associations with marijuana, and famously landed in trouble in 2018 for vowing to take Tesla private at $420 a share. On June 28, he tweeted: “69 days after 4/20 again haha.”

The shorts have the word “S3XY written on the back, a reference to Tesla’s Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y vehicles.

A description for the shorts on Tesla’s website reads: “Celebrate summer with Tesla Short Shorts. Run like the wind or entertain like Liberace with our red satin and gold trim design.

“Relax poolside or lounge indoors year-round with our limited-edition Tesla Short Shorts, featuring our signature Tesla logo in front with “S3XY” across the back. Enjoy exceptional comfort from the closing bell.”

Three minutes after Musk tweeted the link to the shorts on Tesla’s online store, he tweeted “Dang, we broke the website.” Yahoo Finance reports Tesla’s online store became briefly inaccessible.

At the time of writing, only XL-sized shorts are still available and it appears Tesla will only ship the shorts within the US.

Tesla’s limited-edition shorts.

Image credit: Tesla

Musk has form in releasing incongruous limited-edition merchandise.

Tesla has in the past brought out a line of surfboards, and his public venture The Boring Company sold a giant blowtorch called the “Not-a-Flamethrower.”

The Tesla billionaire has a particular penchant for short shorts however, which he sometimes uses to taunt short-sellers who bet against Tesla’s stock.

Musk has a well-documented disdain for short sellers, tweeting in October 2018 :”What they do should be illegal.” In the past, he has sent packs of assorted shorts to billionaire short-seller David Einhorn.

Musk started tweeting about releasing the red satin short-shorts after Tesla’s Q2 report on Thursday beat Wall Street’s expectations, sending its stock up by 10 percent.