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Comment by BHSPitMonkey | Hacker News Reader

NVDA's share price enjoyed a nice $6 bump today, so the announcement did what it was supposed to do.

In a sense, it's just an ask to public investors for added capital to do a thing, and evidently a number of investors found the pitch compelling enough.

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Increase in share price doesn't provide extra cash to a company. They'd have to issue new shares for that.

But company owns stock right? So they can sell those stocks no?

It can, but investors don't like that since it dilutes the value of their own shares. Which is why large companies usually do the opposite - share buybacks. Nvidia in fact bought $24 billion worth of its own shares in the first half of 2025, and plans to spend $60 billion more in buybacks in upcoming months.

That has to be compared with how much stock the company is “selling”, via equity compensation to employees.

Which investors also usually don't like. It says "we have all this cash, but we have no idea what to do with it so we are buying out own stock". While I'd expect a company to actually invest (into research, tech, growth etc.) with it's excess cash to make more money in the future.

Preferred by some to dividends.

If stock buybacks cause the price to go up like it should in theory, that's less of a tax hit than dividends! I'll take it

It doesn't directly, but it helps because they can do deals where they buy things with stock, like people's labor or small companies, and now that "money" is more valuable.

It does help with employee stock compensation. If your stock doubled in the past year, then you just need to dole out 50% of shares as last year in equity refreshers to retain talent.

This assumes your staff are not a bunch of boglehead freaks constantly on blind and crunching spreadsheets and grinding their leetcode for that perfectly timed leap.

RSU vesting is a bit like options. You have the option but not the obligation to stay in the job!

Nvidia probably has the opposite problem - employee stock has appreciated so much that you have to convince them not to retire.

Maybe but people's spending also dramatically goes up as they start making more money. You buy that $5m vacation home at Tahoe, you buy fully-loaded Rivian SUVs, you send your kids to expensive private schools, you fly only first-class on family vacations, and you are back to needing to work more to sustain this lifestyle.

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