EBay Cuts 7% of Workforce, Agrees to Standstill with Icahn
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"They bought back a lot of shares, they added one of Icahn’s employees to
the board, they are cutting costs -- those are the things investors care
about more than the actual performance of the company," said Gil Luria, an
analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc., who has the equivalent of a hold rating
on the stock.
Ebay is an abstraction about which no one actually cares fundamentally, they only care about it as a means to an end. If investors are getting paid (and a general stock buyback means more than those two got paid), they are getting what they care about out of eBay.
Investors care about performance only as a means to get paid, not because they care about the abstraction that they are investing in independent of what it brings them.