The $25B programme has no expiration date and sits on top of a December 2024 authorisation that still had $6.8B remaining. Netflix’s board approved it on 22 April. Shares rose 1.5% in premarket trading on the news, after falling as much as 10.8% following the Q1 report on 16 April.
Netflix’s board authorised an additional $25 billion share repurchase programme on 22 April 2026, with no expiration date, in a regulatory filing made the following day.
The new authorisation is in addition to a buyback approved in December 2024 that still had $6.8 billion remaining for purchases as of 31 March.
Bloomberg reported the buyback comes after a “disappointing financial outlook” sent shares plunging; shares had fallen roughly 9–10% in after-hours and premarket trading following the company’s Q1 earnings release on 16 April.
They rose 1.5% in premarket on 23 April on the buyback announcement.
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The Q1 earnings report itself was mixed in the way that has become familiar for Netflix: beats on headline figures, pressure from the forward guidance. Revenue grew 16% year-on-year to $12.25 billion, ahead of the $12.18 billion analyst consensus.
Earnings per share came in at $1.23, a significant beat versus the $0.76 Netflix itself had forecast, but the headline EPS was heavily inflated by a one-time $2.8 billion termination fee Netflix received after walking away from its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros.
Discovery’s streaming and studio assets. Strip that out, and underlying EPS from operations was roughly $0.58. Paid members exceeded 325 million globally.
The ad-supported tier reached 190 million monthly active viewers across 12 countries, on track to roughly double to $3 billion in ad revenue for the full year.
The termination fee requires context. Netflix had bid approximately $82–83 billion in a cash-and-stock offer for Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets. Paramount Skydance then submitted a competing all-cash offer of $111 billion.
Netflix declined to match it and exited the deal in late February 2026, triggering the termination fee payment. The $2.8 billion was paid by Paramount Skydance on behalf of WBD. It boosted Netflix’s full-year 2026 free cash flow forecast to $12.5 billion.
The cash position at the end of Q1 was $12.3 billion, elevated partly because Netflix had paused its share buyback programme during the deal process; it resumed repurchases after walking away, buying back 13.5 million shares for approximately $1.3 billion in Q1.
The share price reaction that prompted the buyback came from three sources.
First, Q2 2026 revenue guidance of $12.574 billion fell slightly below analyst consensus of $12.63 billion, implying a deceleration in growth rate.
Second, full-year 2026 operating margin guidance was maintained at 31.5%, below the consensus of 32%, despite the $2.8 billion windfall and US price increases of approximately 11% on average that took effect in late March.
Third, Netflix co-founder and Chairman Reed Hastings announced he would step away from the board after June 2026. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters continue to lead the company.
Netflix maintained its full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $50.7 billion to $51.7 billion and reiterated plans to invest $20 billion in films and series. Content amortisation growth is expected to be front-half weighted due to the timing of title launches, with the highest year-on-year growth rate in Q2 before decelerating to mid-to-high single-digit growth in the second half.
The $25 billion buyback, in that context, is a signal that Netflix views its own shares as the best use of the capital it received from walking away from the WBD deal, a more conservative deployment than a transformative acquisition, but one that provides immediate per-share value to existing shareholders as the stock finds its post-WBD level.
