How did Alphabet come up with the weirdly specific number of $5.099 billion for its buyback of class C shares? By taking the square root of 26, which not-so-coincidentally is the number of letters in the alphabet.
The big stock repurchase is driving up shares of Alphabet in after-hours trading. At the time of this post, shares were up 9.18 percent in after-hours trading.
Shareholders have been pressing Google to return money in the form of stock buybacks since the company reported it had $70 billion in cash on hand at the end of June.