Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then

Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks. It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it. We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing. Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.