But this is exactly what I mean: the title is worded to elicit an emotional response - and it clearly succeeds at that.

This is FT however, I'd expect them to be professional enough to avoid this crappy game of clickbait titles. If the NY Post wrote a headline like "SoftBank suffers a massive $4 billion loss!!!111" I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

From a purely informational perspective, this headline doesn't tell me anything about the actual severity of this loss for SoftBank.

Sorry, I don't agree. Billions of dollars lost are still billions of dollars lost. I agree that some people will want to know in percentages of this or that, and you are clearly one of those people. But you're not their only reader, and I think it's reasonable and appropriate for people to have an emotional response to somebody gambling and losing the equivalent of the lifetime earnings of a couple thousand people.

Context is very important because otherwise you can't claim that the money could've been feasibly spent better and can't even distinguish between loss from gross incompetence or just normal fluctuations.

The Norwegian Govt Pension Fund manages $1 trillion of assets. It's value is likely to fluctuate by billions each day. Would you level the same accusations against them?

Size matters tremendously for these things.

Nobody is saying that the percentage change should never be spoken of again. Nobody is saying that context is irrelevant. Nobody is saying that the topic doesn't deserve a full article, which it got.

For another perspective, two blockbuster drugs could have been funded from start to finish.