Among the many excesses of our irrationally exuberant financial markets is the sudden ubiquity of Adjusted EBITDA, the audacious effort of so many companies these days to create an illusion of staggering profitability. There are valid reasons, in theory, why a business should want to highlight its ability to generate cash flow, minus recurring expenses such as interest, depreciation, taxes, and so forth, in addition to one-offs like bonuses. More recently, however, these experiments in creative accounting have become increasingly absurd. WeWork’s Adam Neumann is perhaps most famous for trying to pass off a made-up metric, “Community-adjusted EBITDA,” that subtracted basic expenses like rent, marketing, staffing, and even administrative costs.