Apple just bought back more of its own stock last quarter than Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle COMBINED. And that's genuinely embarrassing. For 3 years, Apple was the company everybody laughed at. It had the broken Siri and the tiny AI budget, and every analyst on TV said Tim Cook had slept through the biggest technology shift since the iPhone. So let's check the scoreboard after Monday night: Apple spent $24 billion buying back stock in the September quarter. A Reuters analysis of LSEG data puts the buybacks of those 5 AI giants at $13.6 billion for the same quarter. That's down 83% from $81.8 billion a year earlier. Alphabet and Meta haven't repurchased a single share in 2026. Amazon hasn't bought back stock since 2022. These are some of the most profitable companies on Earth, and they've nearly stopped buying back stock so they can pour concrete. Now this is where it gets really insane: Amazon spent $77.3 billion on capex in its latest quarter. It brought in $42.4 billion of operating cash and raised $48.1 billion in long-term debt. Apple spent $2.24 billion. That's under 3% of what Amazon spent, and Apple still pulled in $28 billion of operating cash and handed basically all of it back to shareholders. And Wall Street noticed too. Apple closed last Friday at $5.03 trillion, above Nvidia at $4.93 trillion. So Apple ended the week worth more than the company selling chips to everybody else. Meanwhile, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon lost about $665 billion in market value in the first session after each one reported. Alphabet alone lost about $496.5 billion, in a quarter where Google Cloud revenue grew 103%. So Google delivered the growth the entire AI trade has been begging for, and investors still looked at the bill and ran. But the part I find hilarious is the Siri deal: Apple reportedly pays Google around $1 billion a year to run Gemini inside Siri. Neither company has confirmed the terms. And Google has been paying Apple around $20 billion a year to stay the default search engine on the iPhone. So Alphabet burned through its cash flow to build the model, posted negative $9.1 billion of free cash flow last quarter, and then rented that model to Apple for a rumored 5% of what it pays Apple for search. That's the whole AI bull case in one contract, and I think it points in a very uncomfortable direction. The money was always supposed to flow to whoever owned the smartest model. But Apple owns the iPhone, and I don't think the people holding one care whose model is answering them. So the builder takes the debt, the depreciation and the power bill, and the owner of the customer takes the toll. If I'm right about that, a lot of this capex never earns its money back. So who looks smarter 2 years from now: Apple, or the 5 giants who stopped paying their shareholders to build the future?