Gemini Links 04/02/2026: Humanity and Animality, systemd (Controlled by Amutable, a Proxy of Microsoft) Moves on to "Extinguish" Phase
Sexism & GNOME: shaming men, hiding women, Sonny Piers update

You Know Microsoft's "Value" is 100% Fictional When in One Single "Trading" Day in Wall Street It Loses THREE TIMES More in "Value" Than It Was 'Worth' in 2009

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 04, 2026,
updated Feb 04, 2026

As we put it last summer: (because visuals typically help)

Earlier today: They Know Microsoft Layoffs Are About to Hit Them Hard | Microsoft's Giant Snowball of Layoffs and PIPs (in 2026)

Microsoft did not deny this^*. Staff will be tripped up and after shaking the tree for low-hanging fruit the branch will be cut. Then some Microsoft propaganda sites, funded by Microsoft itself, will twist and spin to pretend "it ain't happening" (they fancy talking about misleading yardsticks like "headcount" or fiction/vapourware as the "formal excuse").

From what we can gather, having researched some financial forums, shareholders will want answers because they're beginning to experience discomfort and disbelief when told about "investment in AI" or slop as the promising, rosy future. They are expecting some action (like "RA"). There are soft ultimatums for breakup.

We don't know when it'll happen, only that this will happen some time soon. To insiders, this is stressful and can wound up eye-watering; but reality or realistic expectations are better than self-delusion. The latter is highly destructive in the long run.

One particular set of commentaries that we found insists that Microsoft isn't really investing in "AI", it's just losing a bundle of money, then framing it as "investment" in some hypothetical future. It did the same at the start of 2025. It knew 30,000+ layoffs would follow that year.

Microsoft is not worth 4 trillion dollars. It's not worth even 1 trillion dollars. As somebody put it an hour ago regarding IBM: "IBM stock price hovers around $290. It is still over-valuated. In reality, it should not exceed $100. That is the value of what is left of IBM assets. The rest is just paying for garbage." 19 minutes ago someone else wrote: "You need to zoom out some, to more than just the last 6 months. From 2011 - early 2024 IBM stock hovered around $150. August 2024 was the first time IBM stock broke $200 in over a decade. The entire runup from $150 to $320 is something that happened over the last 18 months. We'll see $150 again before long, bet on it."

By how much will MSFT fall? Let's get popcorn and watch the freak show. Microsoft does not behave like a company riding trillions but like a company that struggles with payroll.

Gaming the share price^** is only possible as long as regulators are either asleep or simply authorise (having perhaps already legalised) accounting fraud. It's not just Microsoft^*** and it is highly dangerous to the economy's stability because of national debt^****. The public pays with inflation. █

_____

^* Good thing they prefer not to lie with some official statement (just some tweet in response to a tweet, using some unofficial but authentic account of a dishonest spinner). The slopfarms and some corporate media falsely attributed the tweet to Microsoft, "but 'not denying' is not the same as an admission," I'm reminded by an associate. If what was published was categorically false, Microsoft would deny it formally, not try to change the facts (based on the leaked information). They're definitely hiding something big.

^** We would like also reference Cory Doctorow's recent post about stock buybacks and cite/quote how that works:

Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services. This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but scientific, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.
In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company. When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes up while its value goes down.

I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion. That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.

Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.

What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is more than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm. If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop more than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price up.

This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name – just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.

This is categorically untrue. Dividends do take money out of the company's coffers and distribute them to its shareholders, sure – but a dividend is a bet on the company's future success, which is why a company's share prices rise after a dividend is declared. Investors observe a company that is so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.

But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.

That dividend would not send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.

Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up.

In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth. When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse.

^*** Not only Microsoft is doing it. IBM and GAFAM do this routinely; it's the "new normal".

As somebody put it this week in his blog: "Tim Cook is giving up his reputation in order to preserve not the company or its people, but rather the stock price. Is that noble?"

This "applies to Microsoft too," we're reminded, and as Doctorow (above) put it 2 days ago: "I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt. This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks [...]"

^**** We can always link to previous posts about government bailouts for Microsoft (i.e. borrowed money, with taxpayers taking/footing the bill, ending up in Microsoft's coffers):

You Know Microsoft's "Value" is 100% Fictional When in One Single "Trading" Day in Wall Street It Loses THREE TIMES More in "Value" Than It Was 'Worth' in 2009

Other Recent Techrights' Posts