The plan includes a switch to a quarterly dividend of 8 cents per share and the buyback of as much as $30 billion in stock over the next four years.
Microsoft Shareholders to Get 75 Billion USD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
If they buy back $30bn of stock, how much would be left? Will this be the dawn of self-owned mega-corporations, as discussed in everyone’s favorite cyberpunk novels? Conspiracy theories aside, a corporation that owns its own stock is, well, kinda scary.
Damien
They buy stock back because of overcapitalization. Let’s say, you own two shares, the other guy owns two shares and the rest of investors own two shares each. Now, when buying stock back, the company would buy equal amount from each shareholder, in our case, say each shareholder will give up one share. In conclusion, you get money but overall distribution of shares will remain the same-you 1, the other guy 1 and the rest 1 each.
Thank you .mad from Estonia, for clearing that up. Anyway, I read somewhere that Bill G. is going to donate around 3 billion from this to the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” (BMGF?). He is keeping something like 300 mil.
…MS is paying out $3 USD per share in cash. That’s a lot of money to give out.
get over it, MSFT rocks… don’t wanna be a troll or anything but give the guy some credit. nothing is original, it all came from somewhere. i don’t find anything defective about XP, works with all hardware, no need 2 waste time searching for drivers, its a great gaming platform, don’t need any binaries to run doom, eh, w/e.
I never worry too much about Gate’s making money. Thru his foundation he is “likely” the largest single philanthropist in history, or certain to become so at some point. He is using his personal wealth to do good things for people that need it the most.
It’s rather tough to fault a man who has given away more money in less than 20 years than the Rockerfellers and Carnagee’s managed to do in over the course of a century.
You can hate MS all you want; however Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and other current and former MS execs have done some very good things for this world with their personal wealth.
Nearly all of the Gates fortune will eventually find it’s way to charitable causes. It’s going to be a windfall endowment many groups, and nothing shy of a godsend for others.
“It’s rather tough to fault a man who has given away more money in less than 20 years than the Rockerfellers and Carnagee’s managed to do in over the course of a century.”
1) Its Carnegie
2) They were richer than Gates is, and probably did quite a bit…. the difference in the value of the doller from 1900s to 2000s is quite a big one
ok, first of all, Gates earns most of his money through investments in other companies.
Second, he has this little itty bitty foundation called the Bill and Melinda Gates fondation for which most of his donations go to, which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft…. but then you were just trolling, right?
what?! How much…? $3bn????? er… Linux? Open Source? What’s that? Nah, always loved XP!
…er…hello hello! is that my share broker???
When you put your money in the bank, that money is circulated through the economy, from households to the bank to businesses in a circle. It is irrelavent if Bill Gates gives away money, because when he puts his money in the bank in his personal investment, that is also equivalent to giving away money. The only way he couldn’t give away money is if he locked billions of dollars in a safe and burried it somewhere where nobody had access to it (but than the treasury would just print more).
If they buy back $30bn of stock, how much would be left?
==================================
Well, there are 11 billion shares outstanding at a current price of about 30$ a pop. So 30 billion would buy a billion shares, less than 10% of the total.
That would leave 10 billion shares. The reason I don’t think MSFT is much of a long-term investment is that 10 billion of anything floating around tends to end up worthless.
Also, where is there for Microsoft to go? There’s not w whole lot left for them to take over. Their profitable divisions are all places where they’ve pretty well cleaned out any competition. At the same time, nobody really sees Microsoft falling from dominance in the foreseeable future, least of all the Wall Street types.
To make money, a stock eventually has to go up, rather than just maintaining a high price for shareholders to make money (aside from dividends).
I often criticize Microsoft’s products rather harshly, but they are one of the best companies in the world when you consider how they treat their shareholders. And Bill Gates is one, if not the only, billionaire who gives away most of his money and power instead of letting it create another wealthy and extremely influential family that could one day turn corrupt and extremely political like so many others have.
You got to respect ’em for that.
And I believe Microsoft could one day fix the problems with its NT/XP system because of the growing competition from Linux. So someday maybe it won’t be an anti-competitive proprietary system and change to be more open and fair and help other startups gain market share and possibly dominance on their OS. But only time will tell and right now Linux has the advantage on fairness, meaning anyone can write an application, give it away under an OSS license, and get an icon on many Linux desktops if they can write quality competitive software. Microsoft should be more active in supporting their fellow commercial corps, like bundling free useful apps for its customers, IMO. But they also would need to at least try to cut back on all that advertisement/spyware to win the hearts and minds of their users.
Bill gives away money, huh? Oh, really?
Sure, he hands out $25 million here, $50 million there.
The Foundation last I heard had at least TEN BILLION in donated funds! What percentage of that is $25 or $50 million? Do the math!
This is a stock laundering scheme, not a charity, morons.
If he didn’t hand out a few tens of millions from a pot that big, the IRS would have his ass.
And anybody who thinks Gates’ family is not political and corrupt like the rest is an idiot. You think the DOJ dropped the ball on the monopoly charges for nothing?
Gates is owed NO respect for ANYTHING he does. He’s a greedy, mean-spirited, lying, corrupt bozo. Read any biography of him and get a clue.