iMoney: What Apple can buy
The most valuable company in the world has a world of possibilities
Last week, Apple, Inc. had to make a truly enviable decision. It had to figure out what to do with the $92 billion of cash the company had on hand. The company decided to return some of the money to its shareholders, which in turn drove the stock price to a high of $601.77 a share. By Friday, the price has settled down to $596.05, still making it the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of over $555 billion. That's $150b more than the second company on the list, ExxonMobil. This only begs the question: what could you do with $555 billion?
Pay some bills
- Pay off the national debt of Greece ($532b)
- Pay off the national debt of India twice ($267b x 2 = $534.2b)
- Pay the combined military budget ($522.4b) of every country in the world except the US $698b, China $119b, UK $59.6b, France $59.3b, Russia $58.7b and Japan $54.5b.
- Fund Nasa over for the next 27 years (based on an annual 2012 annual budget of $20b)
Buy some dinner
- Buy every person on the planet 32 pounds of McIntosh apples (the fruit not the computer). ($2.49 per pound)
- Buy every person on the planet one Big Mac ($3.57 average US price) a day for 22 days
Go shopping
- Buy Microsoft ($267.08b) and Google ($203b) and still have enough money left over to buy Ford ($56.4b)
- Buy the Hope Diamond 2,220 times over (valued at approximately $250m)
- Buy 142,307 copies of House of Mouawad's 1001 Nights Diamond Purse (at $3.9m a piece)
- Buy 10,461 tonnes of gold (at $1,650 an ounce)
Give it away
- Give every person (all 6,840,500,000 of them) on the planet $81.13
- Give every poor person (1.7 billion estimated in 2010) on the planet $326.47
Going on a holiday
- Fly everyone in Oman (population 2,773,479) to the Moon on Virgin Galactic ($200,000) per ticket
- Stay in a luxury two-bedroom suite at the Burj Al Arab (based on the best available rate of $2,717 a night) for 559,642 years
Let everyone know
- Brag you have more money than Switzerland makes in a year with its $527.9b nominal GDP.
OR Come back when you have some REAL money.
(ie things you still can't afford)
- Fund the US military for one year — $663.84 billion. (2010 budget)
- Fund Nasa's mission to Mars — $700 million (estimated)
- Pay off the external debts of any of the top 20 most indebted countries. For example, $555b would only pay off less than 4 per cent of the US national debt of $14,825,163,000,000.
