Every share in a company is a claim on a fraction of its profits, and the size of that fraction depends on how many shares exist. When the count shrinks, each share's claim grows, and when new shares are created, each claim gets a little smaller. Companies shrink the count by buying their own shares back on the stock market, and they grow it, often with little notice, by paying their staff in stock.
Headlines tend to cover only the first of those. A board can approve billions of dollars of buybacks and then buy very little, because an approval sets a ceiling and leaves the timing to the company's executives. Meanwhile the shares handed to employees keep arriving every quarter, and each one adds to the count that a buyback is meant to shrink.
The way to see what is really happening is to read two lines in the company's own reports. One is the note on how much stock it bought back, and the other is the number of shares outstanding. Side by side, they show whether each owner's slice is growing or shrinking, and that is what moves the per-share figures investors quote.
Amazon is a clear case of the two moving apart. Its board approved a buyback in 2022 and has left most of it unused, while the number of Amazon shares has kept climbing. If you hold Amazon through tokenized Amazon (AMZNX) on the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair, each token tracks the value of one of those shares, so the same math reaches what you hold.
What is a share buyback?
A share buyback, also called a share repurchase, is a company using its own cash to buy its stock back from investors, so fewer shares stay outstanding. Amazon's board approved a program to buy back up to $10.0 billion of its common stock in March 2022, with no fixed end date (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Shares outstanding are the shares held by investors, and a company's profit is shared out among them. When a company buys some back, it keeps them itself, so they drop out of that number. Say a company has 100 shares and earns $100 in a year, which is $1 a share. If it buys back 10 shares, the same $100 is split across 90, and each share's slice rises to about $1.11. The business earns exactly what it earned before.
The board's approval, called an authorization, lets the company buy up to a set amount, and it is where most headlines stop. Amazon's filing says the program lets it buy shares "opportunistically from time to time when it believes that doing so would enhance long-term shareholder value" (source: Amazon Form 8-K, March 9, 2022). That wording leaves both the timing and the choice to buy at all with the company. The dollar figure in the announcement tells you the most Amazon may spend, and the quarterly reports tell you what it actually spent.
The word itself causes some mix-ups. Many people who search "Amazon buyback" are looking for Amazon's Trade-In service for used devices and electronics, which happens to share the name. BloFin's guide to what Amazon stock is sorts out which phrase means what. In investing, the word means the stock program.
How much stock has Amazon bought back?
Amazon bought back 46.2 million shares for $6.0 billion in 2022 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). It bought none from 2023 to 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). None followed through June 2026, so $6.1 billion of the $10.0 billion program from March 2022 was still unused on June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
The $10 billion program was not Amazon's first. It replaced a $5 billion authorization from 2016, under which the company had bought back $2.1 billion of its shares by the time the new one was announced (source: Amazon Form 8-K, March 9, 2022). The 2022 purchases ran under both programs (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). Take the $6.1 billion still left away from $10.0 billion, and about $3.9 billion of the 2022 program has been spent, all of it in 2022.
The same March 2022 filing that announced the $10 billion program also announced a 20-for-1 stock split (source: Amazon Form 8-K, March 9, 2022). A split gives every holder 20 shares for each one they owned, so everyone's slice of the company stays the same. A buyback, by contrast, takes shares out of investors' hands. BloFin's explainer on Amazon's stock splits covers the split's dates and effects. Amazon restated its older share figures as if the split had always applied, so the counts it reports for 2020 and 2021 already reflect the split (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K).
Period | Shares repurchased | Amount spent |
|---|---|---|
2020 | none | $0 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2021 | none | $0 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2022 | 46.2 million | $6.0 billion (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2023 | none | $0 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
2024 | none | $0 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
2025 | none | $0 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
First half of 2026 | none | $0 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q) |
While the program sat unused, the number of Amazon shares kept growing, and that count is the figure most investors actually see.
Amazon's shares outstanding, and which count to use
Amazon had 10,786,313,572 shares outstanding on July 22, 2026, the count printed on the cover of its latest quarterly report (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). At the end of 2021 Amazon had 10,175 million, so the count has risen about 6% even through the 2022 buyback (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K).
A single quarterly report shows four different share counts, and the gap between the smallest and largest runs to more than 100 million shares (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The cover count is taken a few weeks after the quarter ends. The balance sheet count is taken on the last day of the quarter. The two averages spread the count across the whole quarter, because profit is earned across the whole quarter too.
Count | Date or period | Amazon's figure (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q) | What it is used for |
|---|---|---|---|
Basic average shares | April to June 2026 | 10,769 million | basic earnings per share |
Diluted average shares | April to June 2026 | 10,903 million | diluted earnings per share |
Shares outstanding on the balance sheet | June 30, 2026 | 10,783 million | the quarter-end count |
Shares outstanding on the cover page | July 22, 2026 | 10,786 million | the latest count |
The diluted count is the largest because it adds the shares that employees' unvested stock awards could turn into. Those awards added 134 million shares to the diluted count in the second quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Knowing which count a published figure is explains why two figures for the same quarter can sit a hundred million shares apart. The cover count also moves between reports: it was 10,734,920,870 on January 28, 2026, so about 51 million shares were added in less than six months (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
Treasury shares and float
Amazon had issued 11,298 million shares by June 30, 2026, and 10,783 million of them were outstanding (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). The gap of about 515 million shares is stock Amazon holds itself, known as treasury stock, and the same balance sheet carries it at a cost of $7.8 billion. That figure has not moved since the end of 2022, the year of the last purchases (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
Shares issued kept rising all the same, from 11,246 million at the end of 2025 to 11,298 million at June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). Since the treasury balance stayed put, the shares that employees receive are newly issued ones.
Float is the part of the outstanding count that ordinary investors can trade, which leaves out shares held by insiders (source: Nasdaq glossary, float). Amazon's annual report measures it by value: the voting stock held by non-affiliates was worth about $2.1 trillion on June 30, 2025, halfway through Amazon's financial year (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). An affiliate, in the SEC's definition, is a person in a control relationship with the company, such as a director, an executive officer or a large shareholder (source: SEC, Rule 144). The float is smaller than the outstanding count, and it grows when an insider sells shares into the market.
Where Amazon's new shares come from
So far, Amazon's new shares have come from stock-based compensation, pay that employees receive as restricted stock units (RSUs) that turn into shares when they vest. In 2025, stock awards and employee stock plans added 138 million shares to Amazon's count, while buybacks took away none (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
An RSU is a promise of a share that an employee receives after staying for a set time. Amazon's RSUs generally vest over two to five years. Most are granted when someone is hired or in the second-quarter pay review, and they mostly vest every quarter (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Amazon counts the value of these awards as a cost, and that cost was $19.5 billion in 2025, down from a peak of $24.0 billion in 2023 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
Amazon's statements of stockholders' equity show both flows each year: the shares that stock awards add and the shares that buybacks take away (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K).
Year | Stock-based compensation cost | Shares added by stock awards and employee plans | Shares repurchased | Shares outstanding at year end |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | $9.2 billion | 116 million | 0 | 10,066 million (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2021 | $12.8 billion | 109 million | 0 | 10,175 million (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2022 | $19.6 billion | 113 million | 46 million | 10,242 million (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) |
2023 | $24.0 billion | 141 million | 0 | 10,383 million (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
2024 | $22.0 billion | 210 million | 0 | 10,593 million (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
2025 | $19.5 billion | 138 million | 0 | 10,731 million (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K) |
From 2022 to 2025, stock awards added 602 million shares, against the 46 million bought back. That is about 13 new shares for every one retired. This is dilution: each existing holder's slice shrinks as new shares are issued. More will follow, because 244.4 million RSUs were outstanding on June 30, 2026. Of those, 53.2 million are scheduled to vest in the rest of 2026 and 100.3 million in 2027 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
A second source of new shares is on the way. Amazon has agreed to buy Globalstar, a satellite operator, and at least 60% of Globalstar's shares are to be paid for in Amazon stock, with the purchase expected to close in 2027 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The deal's prospectus, using share counts of August 12, 2026, puts the new shares at about 0.23% of Amazon's count after the purchase if Globalstar's holders take as much cash as the terms allow (source: Amazon and Globalstar information statement/prospectus). BloFin's explainer on Amazon Leo covers the deal itself.
Say Amazon had wanted to cancel out the 138 million shares added in 2025 by buying the same number back. Amazon closed at $251.52 on October 2, 2026 (source: Nasdaq AMZN price history). At that price, the purchase would cost about $34.7 billion.
What buybacks and new shares do to earnings per share
Earnings per share (EPS) is a company's net profit divided by the number of its common shares (source: Investor.gov, earnings per share). A buyback lifts EPS by shrinking the share count, and new shares from stock awards lower it. Amazon's diluted EPS for 2025 was $7.17: $77.7 billion of profit over 10,827 million diluted shares (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
Amazon reports two versions. Basic EPS divides profit by the average number of shares outstanding. Diluted EPS also counts the shares that stock awards could add, using a standard formula called the treasury stock method (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Amazon's results release leads with the diluted figure.
Say Amazon had earned the same profit in 2025 but still had its 2021 diluted count of 10,296 million shares (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). Diluted EPS would have come out at about $7.54, not $7.17, some 5% higher. That gap is roughly what four years of new shares cost each share in 2025's earnings.
The same math applies to your own stake. Say you held 1,000 Amazon shares at the end of 2021, when there were 10,175 million in all. By June 30, 2026 there were 10,783 million, so your slice was about 5.6% smaller, even though you never sold a share.
Over a single quarter, though, profit moves EPS far more than the share count does. Amazon's diluted share count rose 0.9% between the second quarters of 2025 and 2026, while its diluted EPS went from $1.68 to $5.75. That quarter's net income included $53.4 billion of pre-tax other income, mainly from Amazon's investments in Anthropic (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). BloFin's explainer on Amazon's Anthropic stake takes that gain apart.
EPS also feeds the price-to-earnings ratio, the share price divided by EPS, so the share count reaches the stock's valuation too. BloFin's guide to how Amazon stock is valued works through that ratio.
Where Amazon's cash goes instead of buybacks
Amazon's cash is going into capital spending on a scale its operating cash flow has not covered. In the twelve months to June 30, 2026, Amazon made $161.4 billion of operating cash flow. Its free cash flow was an outflow of $7.6 billion, after a $66.1 billion rise in spending on property and equipment (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results).
Free cash flow, as Amazon defines it, is the cash from its operations minus what it spends on property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives. Amazon says the rise in that spending mainly reflects investments in artificial intelligence (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). BloFin's breakdown of Amazon's AI capex follows the spending into the cash flow and profit lines. With free cash flow below zero, any buyback in that period would have had to be paid from cash already on hand or from borrowing.
Amazon's quarterly report lists buying back stock among the options it keeps under review. The others include selling shares or bonds, taking on credit, paying dividends and restructuring its debt (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Whether Amazon should hand cash back as a dividend is the question BloFin's answer to whether Amazon pays dividends takes up.
Apple shows what a buyback looks like when it is the main way a company returns cash. In its 2025 fiscal year Apple spent $89.3 billion buying back 402 million of its shares, against $15.4 billion paid in dividends. Net of 58 million shares it issued to employees, its share count fell from about 15,117 million to 14,773 million (source: Apple 2025 Form 10-K). BloFin's explainer on Apple's stock buybacks covers that program in full.
What Amazon's share count means for AMZNX and the AMZNUSDT Perpetual
An AMZNX token tracks one Amazon share, so a buyback or a new stock award reaches the token only through Amazon's share price. The token's issuer adjusts holders' balances with a multiplier when Amazon pays a dividend, splits its stock or does a reverse split, the three corporate events its guide lists (source: xStocks, dividends and stock splits).
AMZNX is a tracker certificate, a product that follows the price of one Amazon share (source: xStocks, frequently asked questions). BloFin's explainer on tokenized Amazon covers what stands behind it.
Say you hold 10 AMZNX, each tracking the value of one Amazon share. If Amazon bought back about 108 million shares, 1% of the 10,786,313,572 outstanding on July 22, 2026, your balance would still read 10, and so it would if 100.3 million RSUs vest in 2027 as scheduled (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The same goes for the shares Amazon plans to issue for Globalstar. None of these is an event the multiplier covers, so any effect reaches you through the price of the Amazon share the token follows.
The AMZNUSDT Perpetual works the same way, through the price. A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry date, and this one follows Amazon's price. It settles in USDT and offers leverage of up to 20x (source: BloFin AMZNUSDT contract details).
BloFin's comparison of AMZNX and the AMZN perpetual sets out which one suits which plan. Buying or selling AMZNX/USDT costs 0.1000% for both makers and takers at BloFin's Regular tier, and the fee schedule lists the lower rates that come with higher trading volume.
How to follow Amazon's buyback and share count in each report
Each Amazon quarterly report shows the buyback and the share count in the same places. The stockholders' equity note gives any buybacks and the amount left, the cover page gives the latest share count, and the earnings per share note gives the basic and diluted counts (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Amazon files these reports with the SEC, the US Securities and Exchange Commission. For the second quarter of 2026, the results release came out on July 30 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). The Form 10-Q is dated the same day (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Five places in Amazon's filings answer the question:
The stockholders' equity note, under Stock Repurchase Activity, gives the buybacks for the period and the dollar amount still left.
The cover page gives the share count on a date a few weeks after the quarter ends.
The earnings per share part of Note 1 gives basic shares, the dilutive effect of stock awards and diluted shares.
The results release, in its supplemental table, gives common shares outstanding and stock-based awards outstanding (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results).
Item 5 of the annual report has a line headed Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities, which read "None" in the 2025 annual report (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
Say you open the second-quarter 2026 report to check. The equity note showed no buybacks and $6.1 billion left, and the cover showed 10,786,313,572 shares (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The release showed 10,783 million common shares and 244 million stock-based awards outstanding (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results). Read together, those lines say the program sat idle while the count and the award pipeline both grew.
The 2022 authorization was announced in a Form 8-K filed on the day the board approved it (source: Amazon Form 8-K, March 9, 2022). BloFin's guide to reading an Amazon earnings report covers the rest of the quarter's numbers. BloFin's map of what moves Amazon's stock price goes through the other drivers of the price, from AWS growth to capital spending.
If you decide to hold the token, BloFin's guide to buying tokenized Amazon walks through the order on the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair.
Looking to gain exposure to Amazon? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page or AMZNUSDT Perpetual page.
Frequently asked questions
Is a stock buyback a good thing for shareholders?
It depends mostly on the price the company pays. A buyback at a low price retires more shares for each dollar, and one at a high price retires fewer. The same budget can therefore do a lot or a little for the owners who remain. Amazon spent $6.0 billion on 46.2 million shares in 2022, about $130 a share on average (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). Amazon closed at $251.52 on October 2, 2026, so each share retired in 2022 cost about half that closing price (source: Nasdaq AMZN price history).
How is Amazon allowed to buy back its shares?
Amazon's 2022 filing allows three ways, or a mix of them: buying on the open market, private deals or deals set up through investment banks (source: Amazon Form 8-K, March 9, 2022). Some companies also buy through trading plans under the SEC's Rule 10b5-1. Apple's annual report, for example, says its buybacks can be made in private deals or on the open market, including under plans that comply with that rule (source: Apple 2025 Form 10-K).
Why were Amazon's basic and diluted share counts the same in 2022?
Amazon made a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2022 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). In a loss year, Amazon leaves stock awards out of the diluted count because including them would be antidilutive (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). More shares would make the loss per share look smaller. Both counts were therefore 10,189 million, and both EPS figures were a loss of $0.27. In 2020 and 2021 the diluted count was higher by 193 million and 179 million shares (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). From 2023 to 2025 it was higher by 188 million, 248 million and 171 million (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
How many more shares can Amazon issue to employees?
Amazon had 1.4 billion shares available for future issuance to employees at the end of 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). That is the pool its stock plans can still draw on. At the 2025 pace of 138 million new shares a year, it would last about ten years. Beyond that pool sits a much higher ceiling: Amazon may issue up to 100 billion common shares, of which 11,246 million had been issued at the end of 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
How much Amazon stock could its remaining buyback authorization buy?
Amazon's program has $6.1 billion left (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). At the $251.52 closing price of October 2, 2026, that would buy about 24.3 million shares (source: Nasdaq AMZN price history). That is roughly 0.22% of the 10,783 million shares outstanding on June 30, 2026. It is also about a tenth of the 244.4 million RSUs employees held on that date (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Spent in full, it would offset about two months of the new shares Amazon issued in 2025.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Amazon's Form 8-K of March 9, 2022, its 2022 and 2025 Form 10-K annual reports, its second-quarter 2026 Form 10-Q and results release, the Amazon and Globalstar information statement/prospectus of August 18, 2026, Apple's 2025 Form 10-K, Investor.gov, the SEC's guide to Rule 144, Nasdaq's AMZN price history and glossary, the xStocks guide to dividends and stock splits and its FAQ, and BloFin's AMZNUSDT contract details (last read October 2, 2026) and fee schedule (last read September 28, 2026). Everything else is current as of October 5, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Amazon in any form. A buyback authorization lets a company buy its shares without obliging it to, and Amazon's share count can keep rising as employee awards vest, which shrinks each share's claim on future profit. AMZNX is a tracker certificate whose value depends on its issuer as well as on Amazon's share price. A leveraged position on the AMZNUSDT Perpetual can be liquidated by a price move that the share itself would ride out. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.