What part is a joke VW market cap is 85 billion. Apple cash reserves were like 280 they authorized 100 billion share repurchase so prob less now still def. enough to buy it out.
I really find it hard to believe that sitting on the cash or spending it on stock buy back is the best use of that massive massive cash pile.
Spend some on moon shots, making OS X dominant, start a cloud hosting company, consumer cloud
Something history will say and Apple lost their lead because they did nothing with their cash, just like we have hind sight stories about Sony, Kodak, IBM, AT&T/bell and that rail road company
Your fallacy is the idea that you can just turn cash into well-run businesses. You can’t. Cash is (obviously) not Apple’s bottleneck. Cash is not the bottleneck for any well capitalized company, which includes most big public companies.
The bottleneck is coordination.
You start off with a few people reporting to a few bosses... all the signals are strong. Stupidity is minimized.
As a company grows, the distance between top and bottom stretches. It’s like nerves getting stretched thin and unused... eventually the signal is severed.
That’s the bottleneck for pretty much every big company. Apple can’t throw 5 billion at another moon shot because they are barely in control of the 5 billion dollar projects they are already running.
If they had another VP-ready candidate they could throw $5 billion at, they would already be doing that. Between wearables, AR, IOT, and AI they have plenty of well specified goals that are core to their product line.
Apple does not compete in commodity biz. so outside of "Spend some on moon shots" which they actually do just mostly not publicly they prob don't see were to put that much $ outside of stock buybacks.
That "biggest" claim is based on a Cnet article, which is based on a ZeroHedge article, and they just state it as a self-evident fact, that Bridgewater is the "biggest" hedge fund.
And it's again not clear that Braeburn is a hedge fund. (It's very composed of many smaller funds anyway, each with different risk profiles.)
That said, yes, Apple's cash is absolutely not just sitting in Tim Cook's basement.
the market capitalization just reflects the total value of all outstanding shares, not necessarily the price at which anybody would be willing to fork their shares over.
If you'd try to take over VW you'd need to put significantly more money on the table. (if the majority shareholders were at all willing to sell).
There has been a takeover attempt against Volkswagen by Porsche which failed precisely for that reason. Stock price rose, financing fell apart. And the Porsche owners already had a large chunk of the Volkswagen shares, at least in the extended family.
Actually it failed for a bunch of reasons, and by the time Porsche had to make the takeover bid they had to offer below stock price, because they ran out of money. In the end Qatar invested a billion or two (who keeps track of small change anyway) into Porsche to reduce their billions of debts a bit and VW effectively swallowed Porsche.
IIRC in the aftermath several analysts stepped forward saying the entire approach was flawed and was extremely unlikely to work out from the outset; Porsche committed some strategic mistakes later on in the process, which did not improve things.
Well again Apple has enough on hand to pay 3x the current market cap and I don't really remember situations were someone payed 3X premium in a take over of large public company. To have a controlling stake they have enough to pay 6x the current share price it would be really hard to argue that 500% premium would not be enough.
Spend some on moon shots, making OS X dominant, start a cloud hosting company, consumer cloud Something history will say and Apple lost their lead because they did nothing with their cash, just like we have hind sight stories about Sony, Kodak, IBM, AT&T/bell and that rail road company