I think you are looking at this without seeing bigger play here for the short sellers.
Let's start off by stipulating a premise. There are certain actors on this board who are making a massive investment of time and effort to talk down this stock. Those actors would logically have to have some vested interest in even being on this board. There is no way around this fact. What that interest is can be debated, so let's walk down both of the most likely avenues. They either A. Own shares and have a financial interest in this company doing well, or B. Do not own shares. No person in their right mind who owns shares, would log on every single day and talk down a stock they want to go up. No one. NO ONE. Ergo, we know that it is option B.
Ok, why would someone who doesn't own shares, log on every single day to trash talk a stock. Either A. they are being compensated to do that (again, people have to have an incentive to make an action), or B. they benefit from the stock price going down. You could possibly argue C. they are retaliating against someone on the board and just being a troll, but those are usually motivated by emotion/revenge and that motivation fizzles out - they wouldn't be doing it for 10 years.
Now, we are left with the most likely scenario that we are dealing with actors on this board who own no shares, but have a personal financial interest in the stock price dropping as a principal or being paid by a principal.
Who are the only people that would fit in that scenario? People trying to short the stock down. But you bring up a good point. Why would someone short a stock all the way down at 3 cents? Seems risky, right? Wrong.
There are two motivations to short a stock - 1. to make money on trading while it is going down, and 2. to acquire a company for pennies on the dollar. These actions do NOT have to be mutually exclusive, and even if they were in this scenario, do not forget that greed makes many people turn a great investment in to a horrible one. Many people have mocked those on this board who didn't sell in the 90 cent range. They are mocking their greed because those people thought that it would continue to go up. You can apply the same logic to someone who has been shorting all the way down. They've made this much money. Why wouldn't they think they can continue to drop it all the way? 3 cents doesn't sound like a lot of room for gain, but if you get 3 cent to drop to 2, that is a 33% gain. While trying to eek out that last little bit, some of the short traders got caught with their pants down.
On the point, that the above goals not having to be mutually exclusive, the short traders could have been pushing the price down to set ELTP to fail and they acquire it for pennies on the dollar. The CEO of Whole Foods was notorious for trolling investment boards of grocery chains he wanted to acquire. After pushing the price down using multiple online personas, he would then make a buyout offer in the real world. The more savvy of the shorters have been pushing this down for years in order to acquire shares through multiple arms. So, their "losses" on the shares they got caught on, are offset by the acquired shares ( though I don't believe it fully covered their losses just yet). This straddle position, cushioned most of the blow, and at this point they are frantically trying to push things low for as long as they can because Nasrat caught them sleeping and now they have to rush to make they move they were planning to make.
One final note on this. Hubris is the spear in Achilles' foot. One, person for sure, and possibly, group on here, got way too arrogant with the moves they were making. Like many crime shows, there's always that one little mistake, that one thing you slipped up on and you thought, "It's fine." It's not. We saw it and there's nothing you can do to erase the history of it now. I can't wait to watch it all play out.
