We Can't Tell If Elon Musk's Tesla Short Shorts Announcement Is a Joke

By Sean Norris

Elon Musk is a lot of things. Eccentric billionaire. Futurist visionary. Corporate CEO. Sometimes, those things exist at odds with one another—a complicated mix that's as volatile as it is genius. You could spend countless words and hours trying to parse it, so we're not going to do that here. Instead, we're going to focus on that other thing Elon Musk is: promotional products virtuoso.

The latest entry in his oeuvre? Tesla short shorts. Maybe.

We've been following Musk's promotional prowess for awhile. First there was the branded merchandise for The Boring Company, which started innocuously enough with hats before escalating straight to branded flamethrowers. Then there were the Tesla promotional surfboards that sold out instantly. Somewhere in between were, in Musk's own words, "lifesize LEGO-like interlocking bricks made from tunneling rock that you can use to create sculptures and buildings," whatever that means.

All of those items were massive hits. (Well, the ones that hit production, anyway. The building bricks have yet to see the light of day.) And all of them but the surfboards were announced on Twitter. So when Musk takes to the platform to announce new merchandise, as he did on Friday, we have to take it seriously, even if it seems like a big joke. Case in point:

Short shorts coming soon to Tesla merch

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2018

This tweet is some superb dad-joke-meets-stock-market humor, which everyone knows is the best kind of humor. If you don't get the joke, we'll pause here while Yahoo explains it for us:

Musk's tweet comes on the heels of a joke between Musk and David Einhorn, the billionaire founder and president of hedge fund Greenlight Capital.

Einhorn holds a short position of Tesla shares through his hedge fund, an investment decision that indicates the hedge fund executive thinks the price of Tesla will fall. Further, Einhorn recently made public his decision to not renew his Tesla lease.

In response, the outspoken Tesla CEO tweeted he would send Einhorn a box of "short shorts," which Einhorn revealed on Friday that he had received.

This is a fine joke. But what if it's not actually a joke? As we said above, Musk announced other promo ventures via Twitter, and some of them—particularly the flamethrowers—sure seemed like jokes at the time:

I know it’s a little off-brand, but kids love it

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2017

For as forward-thinking as he is in his business ventures, Musk is impulsive as heck on social media. (It's gotten him into plenty of trouble before.) He seems like just the sort of guy who would fire off a jokey, retaliatory tweet about something and then love the idea so much he decides to make it real. In fact, he's already done it once before, sort of.

In response to a beef with Warren Buffett (long story), Musk took to Twitter to announce he was starting a candy company. His initial tweets were so off the cuff and informal it seemed like, yeah, a joke:

I am super super serious

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2018

Yet there he was, a week later, posting pictures of peanut brittle with a "Boring Candy" label. Since then, it's been all quiet on the candy front, but the point remains. Musk has the funds to do whatever he pleases, and sometimes, he does it.

Beyond that, he's clearly very involved on the merchandise side. He hyped Boring Company hats on Twitter with a running count of how many sold and provided regular updates on flamethrower production status. Tesla already has a fairly robust branded merchandise offering on its webstore, including a large assortment of promotional apparel. SpaceX, Musk's other big venture, also has a merch store. Adding some short shorts to the mix would be easy, and also probably a slam dunk, given the baked-in hype from Musk's Twitter announcement and the resurgent popularity of men's above-the-knee shorts.

It's enough to convince us that Tesla short shorts could really be on their way soon. Then again, the rest of the Twitter thread got a little out of hand, and now we don't know what to think: