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Comment by asperous | Hacker News Reader

They actually are doing pretty large buybacks though:

https://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-giants-have-ramped-up-...

Apple recently $77B in buybacks, Alphabet $8.5B, Facebook $3.9B

True, but I don't think buybacks are likely to be scaled sufficiently to solve the "problem." Apple, maybe. They do have a dividend paying history and they don't like to spread.

The Alphabet & FB buybacks represent about 5% of those companies' cash reserves... not enough to change anything. Apple have $200bn, though I'm not sure if this is net or gross of the buyback.

I think of these buybacks more as supporting evidence to what I said previously. There is a hell of a lot of "what are you going to do with all this cash" pressure on these companies.

That said $77bn (I've seen $90bn reported) is a truly stupendous sum. Has there ever been a buyback at this scale?

Apple does the largest buyback in the equity markets. Their derivative-based ASR is larger than the entire buyback program of many major companies.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...

At $77B, that buyback program amounts to a $300m bid for Apple stock every trading day....much to the delight of executives whose compensation is tied to share price performance.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/apple-ceo-tim-cook-receives-...

One of these things is not like the others.

They could have used that $77B to fund fusion research, carbon capture research, build private space stations and put man on Mars, but no they wanted to make their already high share price even higher.

Actually a better way to think about it is that they are compensating their shareholders...

That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want. It isn't really Apple's money to begin with... kind of the issue with being a public company. Unless of course its shareholders would look at that investment as sound, which might be a stretch given Apple's lack of background in any of those fields (maybe carbon capture given they have a great understanding of their supply chain and could already be thinking of ways to reduce their energy impact)

> That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want. It isn't really Apple's money to begin with... kind of the issue with being a public company.

Apple and its shareholders are the same entity when discussing “whose” money it is. If shareholders want it used to do buybacks, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want dividends, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want to invest in travel to Mars, they vote for leadership to do that.

Saying Apple’s money belongs to shareholders is a meaningless statement. It belongs to the collection of shareholders as a whole, who have opted to elect in leaders to decide how to spend it.

Well. With such large firms, shareholders are quite a stretch of distribution. Voting proxies and the complexity of introducing a shareholder vote proposal quite drastically restricts the number of shareholders who can make stuff happen at these firms.

That is how ownership in a public company works. The more you own, the more control you have. Before you purchase, you will know what percentage you will own and you have to predict if it will be enough to enable you to accomplish your goals. Or you have to make friends with other shareholders.

> If shareholders want it used to do buybacks, they vote for company leadership to do that.

Only if there is an option to do that.

>That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want

Well, 85% of the $77 billion, anyway.

Why not use dividends then?

The $77B didn't vanish, it went back to shareholders. Indeed Apple could have used it to fund fusion research, but this seems like a complete stretch of their expertise and capacity to execute on a project like that, the money could just have ended up being wasted on projects that went nowhere. Shareholders can cash out, the government tax the capital gains, and both entities can use the cash in the investments that seems worthy to them

It went to ex-shareholders.

the investors who get the money back through share buybacks can do that with the 77B. There is no reason for Tim Cook to be leading fusion research and everything else you listed.

It's a decision someone can make with their own money. Not money of their shareholders.

In fairness, it is impressively large.

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