They return cash to shareholders in the form of buybacks.

Never have isn’t never will, dividends and buybacks are a sign the company doesn’t have use for the money. Meta and Google both eventually started paying dividends because they’re essentially tapped out of internal investment ideas.

Telsa and Amazon on the other hand believe they have something meaningful to do with the money. But eventually successful companies just don’t have anything useful to do with their giant piles of cash.

It’s not really about dividends. If you buy a share of Amazon stock, you’re getting a cut of the value that a million+ people are producing every day by writing code or moving stuff around. The value most workers create for their employers’ shareholders is much bigger than their rent check, and capturing that value is even easier than being a landlord. Dividends are just moving money from one pocket to the other, the value created by people’s work is where the returns come from. Financial returns without value creation are an anomaly, though not necessarily a rare or short-lived one.

Dividends don't matter. What matters is profits (regardless of whether they're distributed to shareholders or not).