A couple of months ago, a radio presenter was talking about the then imminent stock market flotation of Elon Musk’s company Space X. The presenter said that the estimated valuation of SpaceX was [amount X], and that [amount Y] of this amount ‘is owed to’ the valuation of SpaceX’s artificial intelligence (AI) business Grok and AI.
Broadcast news reporters are under constant time pressure to find innovative ways of packaging up largely formulaic news stories, and this seems to be a particular hazard for financial news reporters. In this instance, I think time pressure and the reporter’s quest for original phrasing led him into a poor choice of wording.
It is certainly possible to say that, for example, 25% of the valuation is ‘due’ to one business or perhaps even that this proportion of the valuation is ‘owing to’ that business. Both ‘due to’ and ‘owing to’ are common ways of expressing causation—in essence, a substitute for ‘because’.
But, perhaps strangely, I don’t think it is possible to use the closely related ‘owed to’ in the same way. ‘owed to’ still seems to carry a strong nuance of a debt that is owed. That nuance must also have been present originally in ‘owing to’ and ‘due to’, but dropped away from them long ago.
In this instance, there was no question of SpaceX owing any kind of financial debt to Grok, so ‘owed to’ didn’t work here.
What kind of word is ‘due’?
An editor I worked with used to insist that ‘due to’ should not be used in the same view as ‘owing to’. He argued that:
- as an adjective, ‘due’ cannot be used if it does not modify a preceding noun. A legitimate example is ‘his failure was due to lack of preparation’.
- ‘owing to’ is a preposition and there is no need for a preceding noun for it to modify. A legitimate use is ‘owing to his lack of preparation, he failed’. My editor colleague insisted that ‘due’ cannot legitimately replace ‘owing’ in that context.
I think there is some logic in what that editor was advocating, so I still try to follow his advice on this issue. But even at that time (nearly a quarter of a century ago!), he may have been the only person making that distinction, and I doubt whether anyone else is aware of it now. Almost everyone now uses ‘due to’ and ‘owing to’ interchangeably.