A couple of interesting statistics about stocks that are easily available are related to how many people are shorting it (ie, someone borrows a share, sells it, and makes a profit if they can re-buy it at a later date to close the short position). In the case of TSLA the stock, as of Apr 15, almost 31 million shares were lent out to short sellers ("sold short"). That is out of 72 million shares on the market ("float"…
The most amazing thing about your post is that 95% of your post went right over my head. And I consider myself a fairly intelligent person. :P (There's probably some interesting commentary in there somewhere about the complexity of financial markets and how it is probably bad for society to have a vast portion of our economic growth riding on something most people don't get.)
That's when you start getting into options and derivatives, which are (theoretically) priced on a 5 variable differential equation called "Black-Scholes" (intuitively, you are just buying the right to buy or sell a stock for a particular amount at or by a certain date in the future).
You could construct a trade using those where you would make a smaller amount of money if the price fell, but your losses would be capped above a certain amount. In investing terms, you could buy out of the money calls to hedge your short position, and then your loss would be capped at (price you sold - max(price you have to re-buy at, price you can call your options at plus the option premium). I'll stop there before I get too far out of my league :)