Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)

There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.

The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point.

If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud.

1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.

The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value.

It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from.

In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.

This anti stock buyback meme is silly. It’s like people who are anti shorting stock. Companies list on the stock exchange in order to sell their own stock to raise capital. If they have excess capital, absolutely they should be able to buy back their stock. And buy other companies stock if they see it as undervalued also.

The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.

Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.

I would often see high level executives on the same plane.

I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Graduate_Institute

Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.

If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.

I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.

If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.

(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)