When the stock plunged 92%, everyone else was running for the exits.
But the CEO did something many people wouldn’t dare to do: he aggressively bought back shares in his own company.
In 2021, AppLovin went public.
Its market cap briefly surged to around $40 billion.
But in 2022, the market turned against it.
The stock plunged about 92%,
and its market cap fell to a low of around $3.8 billion.
What’s even more surprising is that the company’s business didn’t collapse along with its stock price.
That year, AppLovin had already generated around $1 billion in EBITDA.
The market didn’t believe in the company, and investors kept selling.
CEO Adam Foroughi later recalled that he simply told his team:
If the market isn’t willing to buy our stock, then we’ll buy it ourselves.
And so AppLovin launched a highly aggressive buyback program.
Over time, it bought back around $6 billion worth of its own shares,
retiring about 20%–25% of its shares.
Here’s the wildest part:
Those shares bought back for $6 billion were, at one point, worth more than $50 billion based on the stock’s later peak.
That’s what “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful” really looks like.
But let’s be clear—
this doesn’t mean blindly buying whenever a stock crashes.
Adam was willing to do this because he understood the company better than anyone: its
cash flow, profits, business model, and how much it could earn in the future.
Ordinary investors saw a stock that had fallen 92%.
The CEO saw this:
The market might be selling his company for far less than it was worth.
So the real lesson isn’t “buy when the stock crashes.”
It’s this:
When everyone is panicking, do you know enough to judge whether it’s garbage—or gold that’s been unfairly punished?
We all know what happened to AppLovin afterward.
The market can get the price wrong in the short term,
but truly great companies ultimately earn their valuations back through performance.
$APP $QQQ $BTC
But the CEO did something many people wouldn’t dare to do: he aggressively bought back shares in his own company.
In 2021, AppLovin went public.
Its market cap briefly surged to around $40 billion.
But in 2022, the market turned against it.
The stock plunged about 92%,
and its market cap fell to a low of around $3.8 billion.
What’s even more surprising is that the company’s business didn’t collapse along with its stock price.
That year, AppLovin had already generated around $1 billion in EBITDA.
The market didn’t believe in the company, and investors kept selling.
CEO Adam Foroughi later recalled that he simply told his team:
If the market isn’t willing to buy our stock, then we’ll buy it ourselves.
And so AppLovin launched a highly aggressive buyback program.
Over time, it bought back around $6 billion worth of its own shares,
retiring about 20%–25% of its shares.
Here’s the wildest part:
Those shares bought back for $6 billion were, at one point, worth more than $50 billion based on the stock’s later peak.
That’s what “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful” really looks like.
But let’s be clear—
this doesn’t mean blindly buying whenever a stock crashes.
Adam was willing to do this because he understood the company better than anyone: its
cash flow, profits, business model, and how much it could earn in the future.
Ordinary investors saw a stock that had fallen 92%.
The CEO saw this:
The market might be selling his company for far less than it was worth.
So the real lesson isn’t “buy when the stock crashes.”
It’s this:
When everyone is panicking, do you know enough to judge whether it’s garbage—or gold that’s been unfairly punished?
We all know what happened to AppLovin afterward.
The market can get the price wrong in the short term,
but truly great companies ultimately earn their valuations back through performance.
$APP $QQQ $BTC