but none of this applies to elastic. it's cash flow positive, and has such a cash hoard it's doing stock buybacks.

As far as I understand companies will take out loans against their own stocks in good times as they expect their stocks to generally go up and to make more money than the payments on the interest of those loans. If their stocks go down they need to make up the shortfall elsewhere. The loans are generally used to keep business operations running smoothly irrespective of actual business cashflow (for example some businesses make most of their profits at certain times of the year). I'm not saying this for sure applies to Elastic but I believe its a pretty common pattern across major businesses.

They carry $575m in debt, which is around 80-100 devs a year if they are paying something like 4.5% on it, ignoring tax write-offs on either case as well as equity comp. There is some calculus to all that, carrying some debt, doing buybacks, whatever other strategies to manage perceptions sure.