Tech giant Apple last year took advantage of Republican tax cuts to announce it was bringing home a hoard of $352 billion it had stashed overseas at a meager 15.5 per cent tax rate $140 billion of which it later said would go to stock buybacks).
As of Tuesday, when the company announced its first-quarter earnings, filings show it has about $342 billion in cash on hand, up from $331 billion the previous quarter.
$342 billion is a lot of money—the kind of sum that usually only comes up when discussing federal government programs, a handful of the biggest corporate mergers in history, or Jeff Bezos’s net worth in a few years. Imagining that Apple decided to move all of it right now (ignoring whether or not that is possible as well as the company’s considerable debt), here’s some of the stuff it could throw down for.
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Approximately 72 duck-sized Howard Schultzes (at $5 billion a pop, assuming the duck-sized variant is of equal value) or one Howard Schultz-sized duck (theoretically could lead to the cure for cancer or death or whatever)
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34.17 per cent of the $1,001 billion 2019 defence budget, which seems like enough for an enterprising coup leader to give the remaining 65.83 per cent a good go of it
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According to Forbes’ 2018 NFL franchise valuation, every single NFL team ($114) billion) nearly three times (or they could just buy the Steelers 95 times)
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CEO Tim Cook could kick some money upstairs to his friend in the White House by staying at the Trump International Hotel DC’s Trump Townhouse at a reported rate of $27,917 an evening roughly 12,250,000 days in a row, or until the year 35,580 AD
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At the wholesale price of $1,090 per pound, 142,291,985kg of state-legal Colorado weed (156,850 U.S. tons, or about the weight of two and two-thirds R.M.S. Titanics at the original vessel’s displacement of 52,310 long tons/58,587 U.S. tons. That’s right. Apple can afford nearly three Titanics’ weight in legal weed)
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According to Credit Suisse, Bangladesh (net worth $335 billion in 2018)
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Ending world hunger from Jan. 1 to Dec. 1 (going by the UN estimate in 2015 of $373 billion per year)
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Spitballing the cost of returning to the moon at around $80 billion, Apple could send a guy to the moon, bring him back, send a guy to the moon, bring him back, send a guy to the moon, bring him back, send a guy to the moon, bring him back, and then send the guy back to the moon and leave him there to die (4.3 missions)
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5,061 1962 Ferrari 250 GTOs at a 2018 auction price of $67,565,345
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Hiring me for, say, $111,667 per year plus $33,500 in benefits, for the next 273,623 years (not counting inflation and continuing to pay me post mortem)
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At a current net wealth estimated at $184 billion, around 1.86 Jeff Bezoses
[CNBC]