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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

> Corporation buys back $100 of shares from 1 shareholder. No taxes were due there as there were no capital gains for shareholder 1. Shareholder 2 now owns 100% of the corporation, so their investment is now, all other thing equal, worth $200.

Maybe I don't understand how stock works, but wouldn't shareholder 2 still own only 50%, with the corporation still owning 50% of itself?

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There is a disconnect here that needs to be clarified but you are actually part correct. The 'corporation' owns the shares, but shareholder 1 owns the corporation and thus it is his now. Shareholder 1 now owns 100% of the company but the company is worth 50% less because it spent half it's money on buybacks. So shareholder 1's value of ownership did not increase at all, only shareholder 1's % of ownership. Stock buybacks do not add value to a company and are not like a dividend at all. All they are is an indicator that the board thinks the shares are undervalued.

So...I know realistically, this isn't possible, but what if a corporation bought back every share except for one. Would that one lucky shareholder who probably bought his one share for $20 now own the entire corporation?

yep

A stock buyback is not like the company is buying its own stock and holding it in a brokerage account.

Think about it like ... the opposite of an IPO. Instead of dividing up the firm into n shares and selling them to investors for cash; it's buying back n/m shares and effectively canceling them.

After the buy back, there are fewer shares of the company which are proportionately more valuable assuming the market capitalization has remained the same.

I looked up if a company can do the opposite - basically poof additional shares into existence and sell them - and found out they basically can and it's called stock dilution.

How is that legal? It doesn't make sense to me that if a share is worth x% of a company that said company can just decide "Nah, you actually now only own half of that" and sell more shares.

Fake edit: I googled "how is stock dilution legal" and found this [0] which explained it well and now it makes sense to me. The diluted stock might be a smaller % ownership, but since the company gained value because of money coming in, the dollar value of the shares stays the same.

[0] https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/58391/why-is-stock...

No, the corporation retires the shares after the buyback. Total outstanding shares decrease. All remaining shareholders get a larger percent ownership of the corporation

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