Stock buybacks do nothing economically - you’re just repositioning cash from Comcast’s pocket to the shareholder’s pocket. While it does cause the stock price to go up, that’s not *why* companies do it. They do it to lower their cost of borrowing. Equity financing is more expensive than debt financing because if things fall apart debt holders get first dibs while shareholders are stuck with a worthless piece of paper.
The cost of borrowing is what companies use as their discount rate when building out the financials for a project like EU. So specifically for that project there are two implications:
1) it should be easier to approve because the bar to get over will now be lower (why some people call the discount rate a hurdle rate), but
2) they might *have* to drive the cost of borrowing down by a ppt or two to make it work again if some of the assumptions have to be dialed back post-Covid.
No idea on the second one, but it wouldn‘t surprise me if it was actually rather close first time it was approved. But thinking of the company as a whole, with interest rates so low it makes good sense to retire old notes with new notes and pull back on equity.