BILL Holdings had a good quarter. Revenue up 13 percent, earnings beat, the kind of numbers a company puts in a press release with an exclamation point. So on May 7 the board did the obvious thing with all that success: it moved to fire up to a third of the company — roughly 700 people out of about 2,333 — and on the exact same day authorized a billion dollars to buy back its own stock. Not a slow quarter. Not a demand cliff. A beat.
The money was never missing. There was a billion dollars sitting right there, and the board looked at 700 employees, looked at the share price, and decided the share price needed it more. They called it “organizational agility.” Agility, it turns out, is when you can afford everyone and pick the stock instead. The 30 to 60 million dollars in severance is the receipt — proof they had the cash all along, and proof of exactly who they’d rather not spend it on.
When a profitable company cuts a third of its staff to fund a buyback, the workers aren’t collateral damage from hard times — they’re the plan. Somebody in that building shipped the revenue that beat the estimate, and their reward was watching the surplus they built get wired to shareholders on the way out the door. Good quarter, everyone. Grab your things.