Elon Musk’s attack on Tesla short sellers made them a profit of more than half a billion dollars in one day, analysis suggests.

The electric car maker's chief executive embarked on an overnight Twitter rant about short sellers and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last Friday, after the regulator sued him following a tweet in which he suggested he would take his company private.

The tweets, which labelled the SEC the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission" and claimed that short selling “should be illegal” caused his company’s share price to fall by more than 7pc on Friday. According to data from S3 Partners, a financial technology and analytics firm, this made short sellers a one-day profit of $645.5 million (£493m).

Short sellers aim to benefit from a company's share price falling by "borrowing" shares, selling them on, and then buying them at a later date in order to return them. If they have bought them back at a lower price than what they sold for, they make a profit.

Tesla is one of the most shorted companies in America, with more than a quarter of its publicly traded shares on loan to short sellers.

On Friday Mr Musk revised a 2012 tweet which suggested that short sellers were “often unreasonably maligned”. “The last several years have taught me that they are indeed reasonably maligned,” he said, claiming that the practice incentivises "negative GDP".