
BusinessWeek is running a story featuring Kevin Rose on the cover, with the headline: "How This Kid made $60 Million In 18 Months." That sounds like a heckuva success story, but not everyone believes the math. Our own CEO Jason Calacanis
debunked it himself, but since he owns us and Netscape - a digg competitor - I figured y'all might want to hear it from others in the community too, including Jason Fried at
37signals and
Scott Rosenberg - writer, editor and co-founder of Salon.
The debunking more or less centers around figuring out how BW came upon their numbers, since much of the talk in the article is of what Digg is estimated to be worth, and where the company is going to move next - not what Rose presently has in his pocket. Ultimately, it sounds like BW took Digg's $200m estimated worth and divided it by Kevin's roughly 30% ownership to snag that $60m phantom number. Decent math, but shoddy tactics. BW says they got the numbers from 'unnamed sources', but that doesn't get them out of the trouble of slapping it on their front cover.
Check out the debunkings I've linked for more in-depth details on the article and where BW went wrong, as well as some funny parodies that are already arising, including *surprise!* how 9rules has suddenly announced that they themselves
have made billions in just 12 months!