I hope you took the stock based comp (SBC) at Alphabet into account, not just the headline P/E ratio. It's not as cheap as it looks on the surface.

I attempted to get a robust result by looking at the stock price, reported earnings, and reported revenue over a 20+ year span of time. There's a nice figure showing these quantities graphed over more than 20 years kazart.blogspot.com - Google is among handful of companies

During that 20+ year period, the Price/share, Earnings/share, and Revenue/share all increased by nearly a factor of 100 (unadjusted for inflation).

During that time, in Real terms, Google spent about $180billion on stock based compensation and about $380billion on share buybacks. Compared to a market cap around $4,300billion, it doesn't seem possible for the stock based compensation or share buybacks to be close to misleading.

I like the idea of buying a company doing massive share buybacks. One often wonders if, in trading a stock after it has been initially offered to the public we are just engaged in a zero-sum casino game. A company like google with $380billion in buybacks to its name has most decidedly exceed zero-sum status!

R: