Warren Buffett educated Steve Jobs and Tim Cook about the benefits of stock buybacks

“Apple CEO Tim Cook shared details about Apple’s start of stock buybacks, and has confirmed that Warren Buffett put Apple on the track to do so — and the ‘Oracle of Omaha’ tried to put the company on the path years before,” Mike Wuerthele reports for AppleInsider. “”
“‘I’d been in the CEO spot maybe a year or so, we had a growing amount of cash, we had crossed the $100 billion mark, if my memory is correct. When I don’t have experience with something, I make a list of the people that I think that are the smartest people that I can contact to get advice,’ recounted Cook,” Wuerthele reports. “‘I get his number, I call out in Omaha, and I wasn’t sure that he’d take the call. Call out of the blue, he doesn’t know me from Adam,’ said Cook. ‘But he took the call, and I had a great conversation with him, and that was the first time that I met Warren.'”
“‘He was very clear to me, he said ‘let me just cut through it, if you believe that your stock is undervalued, you should buy your stock,” Cook said, recounting the call. ‘I thought that was just the simplest way to look at it,'” Wuerthele reports. “Cook and Buffett also both confirmed during the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meetings and resultant interviews that Steve Jobs was also given the same advice about buying back stock.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good, simple advice.
Apple Annual Shares Outstanding (millions of shares)
• 2012: 6,617
• 2013: 6,522
• 2014: 6,123
• 2015: 5,793
• 2016: 5,500
• 2017: 5,252
• 2018: 5,000
Current Apple Shares Outstanding (Q219): 4,701
Source: Macrotrends