It may have been outright illegal though. You're taking money from your future shareholders. This may very easily be seen as securities fraud, because you're basically selling shares in your company despite knowing that it's massively overvalued.
If that's all true, selling shares when the market is over-valuing them seems like it's creating shareholder value to me. (It's unethical perhaps; perhaps it's illegal. Either of those would be reasons to think it's harming shareholder value, but the sale itself is creating value.)
Beat the pants off Jack Welch yet fewer people know about him.
http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Dr.-Single...
That is an interesting way of putting it. Sam Palmisano took IBM on a massive buyback program a decade ago, and nothing about IBM since then has refuted your thesis!
https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/sample-letter-securities-offerin...
Hertz actually did sell new shares into the price spike. They went to the bankruptcy judge and got permission to sell new shares to help pay off the creditors. Shortly after they started selling the SEC essentially said "lol no" and told them to stop.