Offshore

⁠Librarian Capital RT @NateHindenburg: Problems With Ed Dorsey This morning, I saw that a blog by Ed Dorsey falsely and ridiculously alleged we plagiarized from him. To be clear, I don’t read this blog, and have never in any way used or relied on his work…

e content and pedophilia on Roblox. Contrary to his view, he did not “crack” the story—he seems to have largely Googled some things and borrowed heavily from those other works.

As with every piece we publish, our Roblox report included citations to those media sources and the sources we actually used, over 300 citations in total, along with our extensive original findings.

The implication by Edwin that his report is somehow the same or similar to ours is just odd. Most of our 75-page report was a breakdown of KPIs – an angle that no one anywhere in the investing world has published on - and expansive illicit and pedophile content that clearly was independently developed by our team over months with nothing to do with Edwin’s claims today.

Core to Edwin's grievance, as he complained to me over the phone, is that despite him publishing some work on Roblox, our report got more attention than his. This frustrated him. Rather than acknowledge that we did deeper work that covered more issues, he decided to try to turn our work into an engagement opportunity for him by lobbing groundless public allegations at us.

(2) Lifestance - During my call with Ed last week, he also complained that he was “annoyed” that we had published on LifeStance after him, although he acknowledged that there was nothing similar about the content requiring a citation, and that we had merely written about the same company with different perspectives.

Our on the ground due diligence for Lifestance was organic and detailed. Again, it had nothing to do with Edwin’s findings, as he himself acknowledged to me via phone last week. But that didn’t stop him from alleging that we plagiarized him by merely publishing research on a company he also happened to write about.

Furthermore, Edwin acknowledges he wrote about billing at LifeStance, while our report mainly addressed clinician turnover issues. He summed up his report with this claim: "After reviewing the evidence, [the blog] is left wondering whether LifeStance is a thriving therapy franchise or an illegal billing operation with therapy on the side."

His claim was based on online consumer complaints. We actually looked deeply at billing, among other issues, but after 22 independent interviews, we concluded it was a mess, but not tantamount to fraud.

(3) Axos Financial - For Axos, Edwin took exception with the fact that our report quoted the company's own description from its own website. Yes—he alleges that the company description from the company’s website was plagiarized from HIM.

The content of our report, including our on the ground research and 21 interviews, was entirely organic. Even Edwin admits this, stating: "Hindenburg’s 9,505-word Axos report has some commonality with [the blog], largely focuses on different sub-issues, and does not mention [the blog] once."

Again, this is because we, in no way, relied on his work.

(4) Freedom Holdings – Again, Edwin takes exception with the fact that we merely published on a name he also published on. Our report, undertaken over the course of a year, was more than 17,000 words with 357 citations, including an independent review of extensive international corporate and regulatory records, interviews with former employees and industry analysis.

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The size and scale of our reports are consistently larger than Edwin’s blog, and the notion that because in a handful of instances we both sourced the same publicly available information, leading to similarities in a couple dozen words in our reports, we owe a citation to him, is silly.

Overall, rather than follow the evidence, Edwin has decided to take the approach of lobbing absurd allegations to farm for engagement, which sort of cuts to the heart of the matter.

The reason we don’t use Edwin’s work is because of the few reports I’d read early on, I didn’t find them useful. We didn’t think spending 30 minutes Googling a company, checking PACER, then slapping together a couple complaints from BBB qualifies as thorough research.
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