Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Twitter Fritter v.4



I am a little late posting Twitter's second quarter results. For the second quarter, Twitter racked up a GAAP loss of $145 million, even as their revenue increased to $312 million. They still haven't figured out how make a dime of profit. From reading their financial results on the twitter.com web site, they have figured out how ignore certain expenses in their non-official financial reports:
Non-GAAP Financial Measures
To supplement Twitter's financial information presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States, or GAAP, Twitter considers certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with GAAP, including adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income (loss), adjusted EBITDA margin and non-GAAP EPS. Twitter defines adjusted EBITDA as net loss adjusted to exclude stock-based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization expense, interest and other expenses and provision (benefit) for income taxes; and Twitter defines non-GAAP net income (loss) as net loss adjusted to exclude stock-based compensation expense, amortization of acquired intangible assets and the income tax effects related to acquisitions.
In other words, my cash flow looks great if you ignore my mortgage and the 3 vacations I took last month. And yet the stock is soaring. Twitter has convinced investors it can print money indefinitely, just the US government, and as long as investors buy their stock, they can.