> Paying off shareholders in one Quarter before you plan a mass layoff in the next quarter, and hinting these are unrelated, seems to me to be a more disingenuo

> Paying off shareholders in one Quarter before you plan a mass layoff in the next quarter, and hinting these are unrelated, seems to me to be a more disingenuous move than to call out this fact. They are unrelated. Intel pays dividends every quarter, layoffs or otherwise. The correlation coefficient between the two events is close to 0. The fact that they massively reduced dividend payments during layoffs is likely correlated, though.