So they’re taking on debt to make their earnings look better? Yikes.
When earnings go up, and the stock price follows, executive compensation also rises. There’s a big incentive to push earnings up.
That can sound bad but most individual investors and practically all institutional investors know better. Publically traded corps have to report borrowing just like they report earnings.
Debt by itself isn't a problem, I'd be happy to buy Apple if they changed their debt to equity ratio to 99.999,999,9%, that would mean I could buy all their shares for $1,000. Over the past 40 years their market cap has doubled on average 30 times over the past four decades. At that rate in four years I could sell my shares for $7T.