What it is. Buybacks plus dividends, trailing twelve months. Capital returned is ambition declined — money the actor could have committed to new positions and chose to hand back instead. It is tracked as its own signed channel, never netted against thrust.

How we calculate it. Straight from the cash-flow statement’s financing section: share repurchases + dividends paid, TTM. The highest-confidence number on the board — it’s a filed figure.

Why it gets its own channel. Netting it into thrust would hide the most informative pattern the board shows: actors with near-zero thrust and enormous returns. Apple returns ~$94B a year against essentially zero new-position formation — that single pair of numbers is the sharpest statement of what Apple currently is. Amazon returns $0 — every dollar reinvested. Oracle’s buybacks collapsed from $17B to $0.2B as its AI capex ramped — ambition un-declined, visible in one line.

Prior art. The reinvestment-rate literature excludes financing flows from reinvestment; defense budgeting splits procurement from sustainment. Same convention: what you build, what you maintain, and what you hand back are three different acts.