> Can you cite a single instance where short-selling has destroyed a legitimate business, ever?

What kind of short-selling? For naked short selling I quickly found evidence: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=273488 That's the predecessor of a paper cited from 2003 SEC testimony of Robert J. Shapiro published at https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/rshapiro122403.htm..., which in turn may have been a related source for the Shapiro citation in a 2008 Time magazine article at https://web.archive.org/web/20080424032340/http://www.time.c..., which I found via the Wikipedia article on naked short selling at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling#Claimed_ef...

That first paper describes a scheme whereby investors bought convertible warrants, used naked short selling to drive the stock price down, then covered by exercising their warrants. And apparently in many cases, as documented by the paper, this resulted in a delisting or even bankruptcy of the targeted firms.

The analogy to companies doesn't work because there isn't a legal mechanism by which you can make your short predictions come true. It's illegal to manipulate markets and most ways by which you could destroy a company (without spending more than you hope to gain) are also probably illegal. If you can think of any legal ones I'd be curious to hear

If it were legal to take a short position in a company and then take actions which blew the company up AND there existed cost-effective ways to do so, then you would definitely have seen more legitimate companies taken down by short-attacks. In contrast, here you have an entity where (a) there isn't the same legal safeguards and (b) there exists a claimed cost-effective way to tank the entity after taking a short position

If you disagree with (a) or (b) empirically then cool but it's clearly a totally different scenario to regular companies