Salesforce Borrows $25 Billion to Buy Back Its Own Stock. Wall Street Is Worried

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Salesforce stock trades at $177.51 after Q1 FY27 earnings delivered a revenue beat alongside a $25 billion debt-funded buyback. The market is weighing whether AI momentum can offset slashed free cash flow guidance. Barclays has already cut its target by 6.3% to $236, while Jefferies holds at $250. The stock is testing the upper trendline of a falling channel that has held since January. Options activity is tilting toward bearish positioning. Q1 Top-Line Beat Validates the AI Pivot Salesforce reported $11.1 billion in Q1 revenue, up 13% year over year. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) hit $3.88 versus the $3.12 estimate. EPS measures the profit allocated to each outstanding share. Adjusted operating margin reached 34.8%. The headline numbers beat across the board. That validates management’s transition story away from legacy seat-based licensing. Want more insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Newsletter here. Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue (ARR) climbed to $3.4 billion, up over 200% year over year. ARR is the subscription income Salesforce expects to bill yearly from current contracts. The growth confirms that customers are scaling AI consumption. Customers have consumed 3.8 billion Agentic Work Units (AWUs) to date across Agentforce and Slack. AWUs measure autonomous AI actions performed for customers rather than software seats sold. The metric matters because Salesforce is shifting customers from paying per seat to paying for outcomes. Public Sector ARR surpassed $2 billion, growing 23% YoY. Slack Model Context Protocol crossed 1 million active users within six weeks of launch. Both data points argue that Salesforce has multiple growth pillars beyond the legacy CRM core. Despite the AI beat, the most aggressive move of the quarter was financial rather than operational. That move is what shifted Wall Street’s focus from the top line to the balance sheet. $25 Billion Debt Move Triggers Wall Street’s Caution Salesforce borrowed $25 billion to buy back its own shares in a single move. This kind of large, fast buyback is called an accelerated share repurchase (ASR). Fewer shares in the market mean each remaining share owns a bigger slice of the company. That math boosts earnings per share even when business profits stay flat. Including the dividend, Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders this quarter alone. The problem is the debt itself. Salesforce now has to pay interest on that $25 billion every quarter. That money no longer flows into product development, dividends, or future buybacks. Quarterly interest expense jumped from $68 million to $317 million, almost five times higher than a year ago. The extra $249 million is a permanent drag on cash flow. Management cut full-year free cash flow (FCF) growth guidance to 4-5%, down from 9-10% just one quarter ago. FCF is the cash a company generates after operating costs and capital spending. Its growth rate measures how fast that pool expands year over year. Less FCF growth means Salesforce has less room for future buybacks, dividends, or strategic M&A. This is the part that worried analysts. Barclays responded by cutting its Salesforce price target to $236 from $252 while keeping a buy rating. Jefferies maintained its $250 target. The cut reflects discomfort with debt-funded buybacks, not a thesis change on AI. The bear case extends to organic growth. The legacy SaaS business, now Agentforce Apps, grew just 7% in constant currency. Stripping out the $444 million Informatica contribution, organic growth was about 8.7%. Without the Informatica acquisition, the core business is barely growing. That makes management’s promise of faster growth later this year harder to believe. CRM’s Options Markets Load Up on Bearish Bets Options markets confirm the analyst caution toward the Salesforce stock price. The CRM put-call volume ratio more than doubled from 0.33 on May 18 to 0.76 by May 27. The ratio compares bearish put trades to bullish call trades. A reading near 0.76 means traders bought roughly three puts for every four calls. That marks a sharp sentiment shift from the May 18 baseline. Open interest, the total number of unsettled options contracts, also climbed to 0.77 on the put side. The shift from light hedging to heavier put accumulation suggests institutions are buying downside protection. Professional traders are not chasing the relief rally. Analysts are also asking whether AWUs are replacing traditional Sales and Service Cloud seats at renewal. That cannibalization risk has not yet shown up in reported numbers but feeds the bearish positioning. The concern is that the same AI that powers Salesforce’s growth story may quietly erode its largest legacy revenue line, the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud business. That bearish inkling is also reflecting on the technical chart. Sell volume on Salesforce shares has picked up since May 19. The heaviest red bar of the month appeared right before the earnings reaction day. That signals distribution rather than accumulation as price approaches resistance. The volume profile matches the put-call positioning. Both readings point to sellers stepping in near the channel top. The falling channel has held since January. The upper trendline is now being tested while supply rises into that level. With heavier sell flow meeting resistance, the next move out of the channel becomes the trade decision for June. Salesforce Stock Price Analysis Reveals Key Levels for June Salesforce stock has traded inside the falling channel for five months. The recent local low of $164.59 in early May produced a relief rally. That rally has now tested the upper channel trendline at $183.80. The 20-day exponential moving average (EMA) at $178.35 is the immediate level price needs to reclaim. An EMA smooths recent price action with more weight on the latest days. Failure to hold above the 20-day EMA opens a slide toward $168.83, then $153.63. The 50-day EMA sits at $183.42, which aligns with channel resistance. A daily close above the $183 zone turns the structure neutral. The next hurdles are $193.40 and the 100-day EMA at $195.97. The bear scenario projects a 13.22% measured move from current levels to $153.63 if the falling channel holds and if the EMA-reclaim doesn’t happen soon. Traders, however, should keep an eye on the 20-day EMA reclaim and the $183 channel break for a bullish direction confirmation in coming sessions.

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