Google has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something together if they have a good idea.

Yes - and what they’ve decided is a dividend. It’s the first in their history. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s something.

The interesting part is why they chose to issue a dividend instead of sticking only with a theoretically equivalent buyback.

That’s not a terrible guess. Together they own 56% of the voting shares and maintain control of the company. A divided puts money in their pocket without needing to sell any of their class B 10x voting shares.

It is $300B/year company growing at 15%. I don't think growth is an issue here

I’m a Googler who doesn’t do anything remotely close to setting capital return policy. Just remember Alphabet has been buying back 10s of billions for a while. Dividends are just a different capital return mechanism.

Importantly, dividends devalue issued unvested RSUs.

I though this was the case, but Googlers will receive Dividend Equivalent Units on unvested GSUs on each dividend payment date.

Could you please expand on this? If a person got issued RSUs but they have not vested yet, wouldn't they be happy that the RSUs are going to be worth more by the time they get vested?

No, because they would be worth the amount less the dividends during the vesting period.

In a vacuum where precise numbers do not exist, maybe.

In this real scenario, if someone's goog shares were vesting at an earlier value - let's take a rough average at a glance of goog YTD to be $145, they will have lost on a year's worth of dividends at $0.2 per share. However, the current share price is $175.

So, through this maneuver, a person holding N goog shares will lose at most 3 quarters of dividends: N * 0.2$ * 3 = N * 0.6$

But they will have gained whatever the stock has appreciated, which at this moment in time works out to: N * (175-145)$ = N * 30$

What am I missing which would make the scenario above result in OP's claim of "dividends devalue issued unvested RSUs"?

EDIT: This also fails to take into account "Dividend Equivalents (DEs)", which are not factored above, and would yield extra income to the person that owns unvested shares.

Corporate finance theory says that when a dividend is issued, the price of the stock goes down by an equivalent amount.

Dividends were originally the main point of owning corporate stocks in the first place.

Dividends started in 1602 with the Dutch East India company. However corporations with shares predate that somewhat. So it wasn’t technically the original point.

They are growing as fast as they can in terms of data center and GPU output. They're supply constrained.

Where would you spend that cash?

They already have >150k employees they can redeploy at will to enter any new market.

It's not like they can make any major acquisitions in this political environment.

Facebook did it, so they will follow.

Yeah, they should spend it making 5 new chat apps.

Google released their latest chat app 7 years ago.

Or halting the layoffs.

This has nothing to do with layoffs. They have plenty of money for salary even after these payouts. The layoffs are intended to reduce costs / increase profit. Google has no desire for employees; they only have employees insofar they are a necessary expense.

Once upon a time it was said by Google leadership the biggest cost Google pays is opportunity costs, chiefly in the form of projects and products they don't pursue.

And back at that time they had way fewer employees than they do now, so that made sense.

Why halt them with performance this good? Maybe there isn't a useful role for that many people at Google as-is

Why? It’s not a charity.