iMoney: What Apple can buy

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.