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OPINION

Flash the cash, flush the cache

Capitalism can seem so perverse. Take Microsoft, which is celebrating record financial performance by inviting 60,000 employees to consider continuing their careers outside the company . Voluntary redundancy may seem to make sense when a company's running out of cash, but Microsoft is dripping with the stuff .

Redmond's first quarter for fiscal 2027 was a bonanza for the tech giant. Its Azure business is up over 48 percent y-o-y, revenues are through the roof, and it has so much moolah it returned $10.2 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases.

This latter move probably soothed CEO Satya Nadella, who recently suffered, due to the vagaries of C-suite reimbursement and incentive packages, a 6 percent cut in his pocket money . But as he’s also a stockholder with about 0.01 percent of the company, his share of the cash return presumably eased the pain.

He won't have been offered redundo.…