Google does it regularly as they pay out so much RSUs they want to keep the same number of shares on the market. You can look and see them historically doing this
Brief notes after spending 10 minutes figuring out how to get this, not nitpicking or saying you got anything wrong. Source was page with "54" at the bottom
- Unvested grants over 4 years vs. buybacks this year
- #s are for 2020, not 2023
- # excludes tax witholdings (i.e. shares they'll never grant).
- For 2020, grants of 15.539 - 10.273 witholding = ~5B, matching sibling comment's correction
- $2.324B is one of 4 columns, real number is $50.274 B
- so for 2020, real #s are 5.26B in unvested grants over 4 years versus 50.274B in buybacks that year.
- for 2023, 22.578 - 10.164 = 12.4B in unvested grants over 4 years, versus 62B in buybacks that year
You're right, it's too low, see link at bottom: my guess is the $2B number, inclusive of all granted but not vested, is the correct #.
In general people way overestimate the # of SWEs at Google relative to the employee #, even within Google.
I don't wanna get too cute in public but some fermi estimates including, say, number of employees per engineer at a 100 person startup, and a jaundiced yet correct view of how much is outsourced at a company with a lot of grunt level SWE work common to every company, bridges the multiplier from there.
Poster is correct: that is not the reason for them.
We can confirm this. Compare RSUs granted/year -- $150M -- to buybacks this quarter -- $70B. ~700x as much.