I screened 3,053 companies with 10 years of 10-Ks. 54 of them spent $1B+ on buybacks and still ended the decade with more shares outstanding

Amazon's 10-K shows a nonzero stock buyback once in the last ten fiscal years, FY2022, at $6 billion. Every other year is effectively zero. Over that same decade, stock-based compensation ran up to $109 billion total, and diluted shares went from 9.54 billion to 10.72 billion, up 12.4%. How many companies are doing something similar? I pulled 10-K cash flow statements for every company with a complete ten-year filing history, FY2015 through FY2024. * 614 of them spent over $1 billion total on buybacks in that window * 126 of those still ended the decade with diluted shares flat or higher than where they started * After throwing out anyone with a single-year share count jump of 15% or more (mostly stock-for-stock acquisitions, not compensation-driven dilution), 54 companies were left 54 companies spent real money on buybacks and their share count didn't shrink. In all 54 cases, stock-based compensation was issuing new shares as fast, or faster, than the buyback retired them. Ranked by stock comp as a percentage of buyback spend, here's the top of the list: * Amazon: $6.0B buyback, $109.2B stock comp (1,820% of buyback), share count +12.4% * Carlyle Group: $1.33B buyback, $2.55B stock comp (191% of buyback), share count +23.2% * Salesforce: $11.6B buyback, $17.1B stock comp (147% of buyback), share count +57.7% * Ford: $2.05B buyback, $2.88B stock comp (141% of buyback), share count +0.3% * Costco: $4.52B buyback, $6.11B stock comp (135% of buyback), share count +0.5% * Illumina: $2.15B buyback, $2.88B stock comp (134% of buyback), share count +6.7% A company can buy back large amounts of stock but it doesn’t matter if stock based compensation outpaces it.