> I think you're very confused about the mechanism behind a stock buyback. It's a way to make the stock value increase. There's no other point in doing it.

There is a LOT of very misleading information being pumped out there by the media about stock buybacks - almost anything you read is almost surely wrong.

If I take your investment to start a business venture, the venture is a huge success, the responsible thing to do would be to give you your money back + your share of the profit. While the share price of the remaining shares remains high or even goes up, I am still essentially "shrinking" the company.

While some orgs issue and buyback shares for money management reasons (or stock price manipulation), they are also a perfectly valid mechanism for big companies with lots of money to responsibly shrink themselves. Instead of chasing the line up and constantly asking for more investment, they are choosing to be a smaller and more profitable. It also turns huge corporate windfall gains into taxable events. I don't think they should be controversial in any way.