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by zaphirplane 2947 days ago
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
3 comments
erikpukinskis 2946 days ago
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.

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qaq 2947 days ago
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.
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macNchz 2946 days ago
Their cash isn’t just sitting around, they invest it via their hedge fund, Braeburn Capital, which I believe is actually the world’s biggest by AUM.
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pas 2946 days ago
There are asset management firms with AUM well in the trillions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms

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.

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