Actually its worse than that - I am loathe to say it, but the author does not understand what he is talking about. 1st read the 2013 IBM annual report's financ

Actually its worse than that - I am loathe to say it, but the author does not understand what he is talking about. 1st read the 2013 IBM annual report's financial section as it relates to this subject. A cursory read will tell you that the following quote is completely false: "There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that IBM spent $13.859 billion buying back those 73 million shares — an average of $190 per share. But in fact the share count only fell by 50 million shares, which means that IBM actually paid $277 per share by which the share count was reduced. That’s a crazy sum of money, far greater than IBM’s all-time-high share price. (The current price, by the way, is $162.) The other way of looking at this is that the $13.859 billion didn’t really go entirely to shareholders, as Sorkin implies. Rather, some 50/73 of it went to shareholders — that’s about $9.5 billion — while the rest of it, about $4.4 billion, went, in one way or another, to employees. And especially to senior employees." Without boring everyone to tears the author makes the completely false assumption that new shares issued are issued at $0 (however employees exercised 5.6m shares at $90 a share, or say the 1.5m shares employees purchased at a 5% discount to market price, there are a whole host of other programs)