Dominic Hopton
Can someone explain the finance math here? Borrowing money to buy stocks. Which is effectively people giving you money to give other people money and the people who will be selling the stocks to you are probably the same people buying the debt? Who you then pay again?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-10/salesforce-plans-to-raise-up-to-25-billion-to-fund-buybacks
Mar 10 at 7:25pmCroissant
Show threadDaniel SpiewakMar 10
@grork First glance (and without having access to the article), this looks less like a finance trick and more like an investor emotions trick. Similar to how stock prices rise meaningfully leading up to and following a split, despite the underlying valuation remaining unchanged.
Show threadDaniel SpiewakMar 10
@grork SaaS companies have been hit really hard recently, arguably harder than fundamentally makes sense, with Salesforce leading the downward charge. In the long term this is likely to level out and substantially if not more than fully reverse itself, but in the short term it risks destabilizing other financial cliffs (such as valuation-backed loans used for corporate liquidity float).
Show threadDaniel SpiewakMar 10
@grork So it probably serves two purposes. One is to prop up the stock value artificially in the short term and put the brakes on the momentum sales (which are really somewhat divorced from financial fundamentals anyway). The second is, if you really believe that SaaS *does* have a future in an agentic world, then Salesforce will bounce back from this heavily, so holding their own stock is a smart investment.
Show threadDominic HoptonMar 11
@djspiewak Wouldn’t, overall, it just make sense for them to issue the debt, and use that for investing in growing the business or similar?
Show threadDaniel SpiewakMar 11

@grork Possibly. Again, the balance sheet kind of matters here. It's all fake money at this level anyway.

It also might not be totally clear how that magnitude of money can be used to meaningfully grow the business beyond how they're already investing. It's a lot of money to try to spend, particularly if you want to do it in a hurry. Salesforce isn't really in a capex-heavy market sector.

Show threadDominic HoptonMar 12
@djspiewak For different reasons than I think it looks a little weird, the market thinks it’s weird too: https://archive.ph/2026.03.11-212332/https://www.ft.com/content/cb01cf27-60a0-4542-862e-88a9e30c170a