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4 Big Tech giants have plowed over $1 trillion into stock buybacks in 10 years — more than Tesla or Meta's entire market value
(markets.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What I'm trying to say is, these companies don't use stock buybacks with the intention of going private. They're doing stock buybacks to keep the stock price high, so they continue to please stockholders.
Stockholder pleasing is unfortunately not going away anytime soon.
The companies value doesn't change, but shareholders hold X number of stock, so to them their portfolio improves.
When companies split their stock, it's to keep the price at a reasonable amount for people to buy - when 1 stock is worth $100 it makes the "minimum buy-in" very high. If the stock is split 1:10, the share price drops by 10x but all shareholders get 10x more share, so it doesn't affect them much.
Ultimately listed companies work for shareholders' benefit.
Neither of those are good options.