WTF Is EBITDA?: A Finance Primer

by Steven Saltman

EBITDA is an acronym that stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It is a financial term that represents a way to measure the profit of a company. It is actually spoken as a word, pronounced ee-bit-dah. Frankly, it sounds kind of silly when spoken, but it is what it is. If you read this book, you’ll know what all those words that make up EBITDA really mean, and you’ll be able to bandy about the term “EBITDA” during casual cocktail party conversation, assuming you engage in casual cocktail party conversation. And if you don’t engage in casual cocktail party conversation, perhaps because you are 14 years old and have already sold your first mobile crypto local media Web technology company that has some nonsense word as its company name like “Zizzout” or “Deelonic” or something, then maybe you can use this term in a derogatory fashion when discussing old people, as in “He’s such an EBITDA, I’ll bet he doesn’t have his Deelonic account geo-back-linked to his Zizzout account.” This book isn’t very long. By the time you are finished reading the entire book, your plane should have landed in San Francisco, if you are on a plane to San Francisco from, say, Boston. I wrote some of this book in 1996 and put most of it on a website called Steve’s Financial Modeling Tutorial, which is still around and holy shit, I just looked at it and it sucks ass. I should probably take it off the Web so that you don’t feel like you bought this book when you could have gotten all the information for free from the Web, which you can, but you didn’t—otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, et cetera.

118 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 20, 2018

Reviews

[Tamara Darnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dumbs down finance in a relatable way

Accounting can be extremely boring and complicated. Steven explains it all very well using humor and great examples. If only my accounting and finance teachers used hookers and drug dealers as examples in MBA school. I would have went a little longer and become a CPA.