POET CFO Thomas Mika Isn’t Here for the Games

There’s a certain type of executive who, when a short-seller puts a target on their company’s back, goes quiet. They lawyer up, issue a carefully worded press release, and wait for the storm to pass. Thomas Mika is not that executive.

When Wolfpack Research dropped its report on POET Technologies (NASDAQ: POET) right before Tax Day — warning U.S. shareholders of an IRS “collision course” tied to POET’s potential status as a Passive Foreign Investment Company — Mika didn’t go into bunker mode. He went on camera. And he didn’t mince words. Short sellers, in his view, are maggots. All of them. No exceptions.

When a CFO “goes to the mattresses” for their shareholders retail rallies behind the company.

“I hate shorts. I don’t discriminate. I think they’re all maggots,” Mika told Stocktwits, adding that he found the timing — deliberately placed ahead of tax season to rattle retail holders — particularly low.

You rarely see this from a CFO. The typical corporate playbook calls for calm, measured, sanitized language. Mika threw that out the window, and honestly? Good for him. Because the Wolfpack report wasn’t a neutral piece of research. It was a pressure campaign dressed up as analysis, and the PFIC tax angle was its sharpest weapon.

Here’s why it didn’t land: $POET was operating at a net loss. As Mika explained, that means there was nothing for U.S. shareholders to declare in the first place. The whole premise of the tax scare collapsed under basic scrutiny. He called it a “big nothing burger,” and the market agreed — POET popped more than 18% the following Monday, its biggest single-day gain in nearly five months.

Wolfpack also took shots at POET’s history of pivots, arguing the company had changed direction seven times while generating just $2.3 million in cumulative revenue since 2020. Mika’s response was straightforward: look at what we’re shipping now. POET holds a $5 million production order for its 800G optical engines. It has invoices from Celestial AI, now part of Marvell Technology. These aren’t vaporware announcements — they’re commercial transactions.

Shorts chose the wrong company at the wrong time in history.

The broader point Mika made is one that often gets lost when short sellers go after small-cap tech names: building something genuinely hard takes time. Photonics integration for AI infrastructure isn’t a software pivot. It’s physics. It’s manufacturing. It’s years of work before a dollar of revenue shows up on the income statement. Anyone who’s actually spent time understanding what POET is doing at the component level knows the technology is real. The shorts are betting most people won’t look that closely.

POET has since committed to providing shareholders the data needed for a QEF election to address the PFIC question going forward. The company is also in the process of redomiciling to the U.S. — moves that pull the rug out from under the core of Wolfpack’s thesis.

POET stock is up roughly 30% year-to-date and has more than doubled over the past twelve months. The short interest crowd picked the wrong CFO to push around.