Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-20/Disinformation report

Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has lost a lot of money over the last month. His net worth is about $67 billion less (as of 2/15/23) than it was on January 24 when Bloomberg estimated it at $119 billion and the publicly traded companies he controls have lost over $100 billion in market value. He was ranked as the third richest person in the world in late January and is now only ranked as the 24th with a net worth of $52.4 billion (as of 2/15/23). Please note that all these numbers are in billions, not millions.

What happened? On January 24 short-seller Hindenburg Research released a report titled Adani Group: How the World's 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling the Largest Con In Corporate History. The text of the report modified the claim slightly to "one of, if not the most egregious example of corporate fraud in history". It accused Adani's companies of "brazen accounting fraud, stock manipulation and money laundering ... taking place over the course of decades." The market value of the publicly-traded companies Adani controls plunged to about half of their previous levels within a few days and has mostly stayed at that level or decreased since.

Billionaires have a history of apparent undeclared paid editing on Wikipedia, including Kenneth C. Griffin (paywall), Robert T. Brockman, Robert F. Smith and several Russian oligarchs. A few near- or former billionaires including Elizabeth Holmes, Greg Lindberg, Jeffrey Epstein, and Peter Nygard have also appeared to hire people for undeclared paid editing.

This report examines Adani and his companies in much the same way we examined those other billionaires: have they used paid editing on Wikipedia to push their points of view or as an aid in their pursuit of wealth?

We remind our readers that no entirely on-Wiki investigation of a user's edits can completely identify an editor's name or employer. Even if the editor identifies themself as an employee of a company, they may be simply trying to embarrass the company, a practice known as Joe jobbing. We can, however, examine the nearly complete record of edits made to Wikipedia and identify editors that are likely to be sockpuppets, or that appear to be working together with other accounts.