With the global economic downturn, companies are resorting to buybacks amid losses. Leo Koguan, who refers to himself as the third-largest individual shareholder of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), has called on the EV company to announce a stock buyback with immediate effect. Companies explore the stock buyback options in order to raise capital for shareholders by using cash to buy their own shares in the open market. A lot of US leading companies repurchased many of their own stocks in 2021. In the year, buybacks reached a record high of $850 billion, with participation from Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) which equally did a lot of buybacks among other publicly-traded companies. Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: FB) also announced buybacks last year. More recently, Alphabet announced buybacks worth $70 billion in April 2022.
