The philosophy had immediate appeal to the raiders, who used it to give their depredations a fig leaf of legitimacy. And though the raiders were eventually turned back, the idea of shareholder value proved harder to dispel. To ward off hostile takeovers, boards started firing CEOs who didn’t deliver near-term stock-price gains. The rolling of a few big heads—including General Motors’ Robert Stempel in 1992 and IBM’s John Akers in 1993—drove home the point to CEOs: They had better start thinking about shareholder value.

If their conversion to the enemy faith was at first grudging, CEOs soon found a reason to love it. One of the main tenets of shareholder value is that managers’ interests should be aligned with shareholders’ interests. To accomplish this goal, boards began granting CEOs large blocks of company stock and stock options.

The shift in compensation was intended to encourage CEOs to maximize returns for shareholders. In practice, something else happened. The rise of stock incentives coincided with a loosening of SEC rules governing stock buybacks. Three times before (in 1967, ’70, and ’73), the agency had considered such a rule change, and each time it had deemed the dangers of insider “market manipulation” too great. It relented just before CEOs began acquiring ever greater portfolios of their own corporate stock, making such manipulation that much more tantalizing.

Too tantalizing for CEOs to resist. Today, the abuse of stock buybacks is so widespread that naming abusers is a bit like singling out snowflakes for ruining the driveway. But somebody needs to be called out.

So take Craig Menear, the chairman and CEO of Home Depot. On a conference call with investors in February 2018, he and his team mentioned their “plan to repurchase approximately $4 billion of outstanding shares during the year.” The next day, he sold 113,687 shares, netting $18 million.* The following day, he was granted 38,689 new shares, and promptly unloaded 24,286 shares for a profit of $4.5 million. Though Menear’s stated compensation in SEC filings was $11.4 million for 2018, stock sales helped him earn an additional $30 million for the year.

By contrast, the median worker pay at Home Depot is $23,000 a year. If the money spent on buybacks had been used to boost salaries, the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project calculated, each worker would have made an additional $18,000 a year. But buybacks are more than just unfair. They’re myopic. Amazon (which hasn’t repurchased a share in seven years) is presently making the sort of investments in people, technology, and products that could eventually make Home Depot irrelevant. When that happens, Home Depot will probably wish it hadn’t spent all those billions to buy back 35 percent of its shares. “When you’ve got a mature company, when everything seems to be going smoothly, that’s the exact moment you need to start worrying Jeff Bezos is going to start eating your lunch,” the shareholder activist Nell Minow told me.