Culper Research says short AppLovin, ‘copying’ Meta’s work

Culper Research says it is short AppLovin (APP), an AdTech platform for mobile gaming apps. The firm says AppLovin wants investors to believe that AXON 2.0 is “a black box,” but instead believes that AppLovin has employed AXON 2.0 largely as a promotional tool and is a “smokescreen to hide the true drivers of its mobile gaming and e-commerce initiatives, neither of which have much to do with AI.” The firm thinks AppLovin, which it says is “copying” Meta‘s (META) work, could go down as the “single largest US stock promotion unraveling since at least the GFC.” Culper claims AppLovin’s nascent e-commerce initiative is a “smoke and mirrors game” and that its recent success in mobile gaming stems from the systematic exploitation of app permissions that enable advertisements themselves to force-feed silent, backdoor app installations directly onto users’ phones. TheFly notes that Fuzzy Panda Research is also short AppLovin.