As if Elon Musk wasn’t having a good enough day already.

With Tesla Inc.’s surprise quarterly profit pushing shares to an eight-month high, he’s also making good on his May 2018 warning to investors who bet against the company, when he infamously tweeted the “short burn of the century” would be “coming soon.”

It may have taken longer than he expected, but Tesla’s 18 per cent surge in pre-market trading is hitting short sellers with about US$1.5 billion in mark-to-market losses, according to S3 Partners’ Ihor Dusaniwsky. That’s enough to erase about 75 per cent of the US$1.97 billion in profits they’d accumulated this year as the stock fell 24 per cent before Thursday.

It’s a sharp turnabout for the bears, who in August had the most profitable short among U.S. stocks, at US$2.75 billion in mark-to-market gains, more than triple the profits for pessimistic calls against Abbvie Inc., the second-best short play at the time. Short interest in Tesla has come down slightly from its September peak, but still represents about 33 per cent of the float, according to S3.