- Cleveland-Cliffs' CEO told analysts on a Friday call that he will continue to "boil" short sellers "like frogs."
- "One day they realize that it's not a warm pool. It's their deathbed," CEO Lourenco Goncalves added.
- The statement followed a quarterly earnings report released Friday morning that surpassed analyst expectations and sent the iron ore company's stock up as much as 6.7%.
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The CEO of iron ore company Cleveland-Cliffs thinks short sellers are in for a rude awakening if they continue to bet against him.
"Oh my God, I have a ready source of free money from this short. It's right there, they probably don't realize, but I continue to boil them like frogs," Lourenco Goncalves said in a Friday conference call with analysts.
"One day they realize that it's not a warm pool. It's their deathbed."
Cleveland-Cliffs reported its second-quarter earnings Friday morning, surpassing analysts' consensus revenue estimate by 22%. The ore producer brought in $743 million and announced it repurchased 13 million shares over the three month period. It also topped Wall Streets' earnings per share estimates, beating the average expectation by about 20%.
Cleveland-Cliffs now has a market capitalization of $3.2 billion. For context, traders held a whopping $795 million short this past week, according to data compiled by financial-analytics firm S3 Partners. That's up 124% since the start of the year.
The odd statement isn't the first from Goncalves. He told a Wells Fargo analyst on a 2014 earnings call "you have a $4 price target and you think we can't sell assets, so I'm going to take the next question, I'm not going to answer you."
Goncalves made increasingly inflammatory remarks in 2018 when addressing analysts who set negative price targets. He told Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew Korn "you are a disaster. You are an embarrassment to your parents."
Directing his statements to short sellers, Goncalves continued, "we are going to screw these guys so badly that I don't believe that they will be able to only resign. They will have to commit suicide."
The company's stock rose as much as 6.7% after earnings figures were released. It traded at $11.34 per share as of 12:30 p.m. ET Friday.
Iron ore has surged in value due to short supply. Prices are up roughly 90% over the last 12 months.
Cleveland-Cliffs shares are up about 47% in the year-to-date. The stock has eight "buy" ratings, four "hold" ratings, and one "sell" rating from analysts.
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