Netflix Spent A Record $4.8 Billion On Buybacks Before Laying Off 1,000 Employees

Netflix spent $4.8 billion buying back its own stock during the third quarter of 2026, the largest quarterly repurchase in the company’s history. Shortly after the quarter ended, the company announced it was cutting about 1,000 jobs, including several high-profile executives.

The figures, disclosed in Netflix’s third-quarter shareholder letter Tuesday, show where the company’s spending priorities lie.

According to its report, Netflix brought in $12.9 billion during the quarter, up 12% from the same period last year. After covering operating expenses, it had $4.46 billion left before interest and taxes, up 37%. That means Netflix kept nearly 35 cents of every revenue dollar as operating profit, up from about 28 cents a year earlier. The company said its better-than-expected profitability largely reflected when it recorded expenses.

Netflix also repurchased 63.9 million shares for $4.8 billion and has authorization to spend another $22.3 billion on buybacks.

Despite those record repurchases, Netflix remains under pressure from investors concerned about slowing growth. Shares fell about 7% in premarket trading Wednesday to under $64, their lowest level since August 2024.

As we previously reported, Netflix’s cuts affected roughly 6% of its workforce, including adult animation comedy manager Aaron Davidson, original animation manager Dan Evans, and film chief Dan Lin.

On Tuesday’s earnings call, co-CEO Greg Peters described the layoffs as a way to decide where Netflix should concentrate its resources. He said some areas had become overinvested as the company grew, and that the organization sometimes needed a “forcing function” to make difficult decisions about efficiency and spending.

The layoffs themselves come with upfront costs, which Netflix says will reduce its fourth-quarter profit. Even after those costs, the company expects to keep 31.5 cents of every revenue dollar as operating profit for the full year, up from 29.5 cents in 2025.

These kinds of business practices are familiar to anyone who tracks big studio behavior. This year, Disney has also cut large numbers of staff while committing billions to share buybacks. Netflix’s record spending on its own stock, followed by mass layoffs, raises the same questions about whose interests take priority when a profitable company decides where its money should go.

The financial disclosures don’t explicitly show that Netflix cut jobs to fund buybacks, or what it would have cost to retain those positions. They do show a profitable, growing company spending billions to repurchase its own stock while eliminating the jobs of people who helped create that value.