I love that we live in a world excess income by a company is just expected to go to buybacks and not towards expanding operations and R&D.
If the money is returned to shareholders, they are now free to deploy the capital how they see fit. This could be for personal consumption, investing in new companies or funding R&D. All of these are positive outcomes for society at large.
But I fail to see what positives can come from putting $425MM into a volatile and mostly speculative digital asset.
It's only recently that companies have decided that pursuing endless (and often pointless, see Google) expansion is better than paying dividends, and generally this behavior is mostly tech companies.
Dividends were very common pre-1980. What makes you think they weren't?
> I think stock is supposed to be like gold, you invest in the value of gold.
The value of a stock comes from the possibility of capital return from the company. If the company never gives anything to shareholders, the value of a stock is no more than the paper it's printed on.
Dividends were often a very small piece of a companies expenses, just to incentivize long term holding of shares, not short term seeking of profits