back to article Jobs: I'll decide what to do with Apple's $40bn cash pile

Steve Jobs has told shareholders not to complain about the Mac maker's $40bn and growing cash mountain as he could decide to do something interesting with it at any time. Shareholders usually get antsy when companies cash piles grow too large, and start demanding execs do something to return the value to... them. Share …

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  1. DJV Silver badge
    Coat

    "flip top volcanic island"

    and other options from: www.villainsource.com

    Nice, mine's the one with the trap door in one pocket and a fluffy white cat peering out the other.

  2. Chad H.
    Happy

    Dell

    They could buy Dell, shut it down, and return it's value to it's shareholders...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Value?

      That is a joke, right?

  3. benedictmurray

    Dropbox

    Apple should buy Dropbox - would fit in well and maybe make MobileMe a bit less terrible value.

    And make an electric Car.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: And make an electric Car.

      Ah! They should buy Audi, that's the perfect cultural fit. They currently build a VW, stick a badge on it and have rich, brand-obsessed twats beating a path to their door.

      1. domorewithsage.com

        sinclair c5

        Hey they could buy all the unsold stock of Sinclair C5's off of uncle Clive!

    2. jonathan keith
      Flame

      Dropbox

      Christ, I hope not. It's a great little product. I'd hate to see it ruined.

  4. Jon of Monkeys

    Bank it...

    Take the daily interest, split it in half, use one half for the advancement of new products. Take the second half and give it to a random member of the public. Disclaimer that they must spend a proportion of it on Apple products for themselves and their friends.

    Sorted! Wheres that marketing director application form?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    It's already gone

    Does anyone really believe apple would tell anyone if they'd spent it? Of course they wouldn't, even if they'd just bought google.

    Anyway, it's obvious that Jobs has already spent it on a massive organ harvesting plant. Thousands of genetically modified rats with human body parts growing out of their sides are being raised at this very moment. The plan is to keep him alive until the cyborg replicator (which is rumoured to be called 'iDupe Titanium') is ready.

    Saintly Jobs for an icon, because he's also bought the catholic church.

    1. Michael C

      good theory

      Well, at least until they have to report taxes, it;s possible, but sooner or later the SEC asks to see the books... :)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Island

    It has to be an island. With stuff hidden in a volcano. And a monorail! Don't forget the monorail!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aphoo!

    With $40bn, Apple could easily buy Yahoo!

    1. Marcus Aurelius
      Joke

      Or...

      Microsoft!

    2. Trevor Pott o_O Gold badge

      Apple could buy....

      ...Amazon? Doubt it. They’ve already got both an e-store and a set of brick-and-mortars. They could simply expand their offerings through there.

      ...VMWare? It would probably be a bigger deal than $40B to pry it out of EMC's claws.

      …Microsoft/Google/Oracle/IBM/HP/Dell/etc. HAHAHAHAHAHA. HA HA. HA. OTOH, I’d love to know how many hundreds of Billions that would take, were someone inclined.

      …Citrix? An interesting thought. Apple sitting on top of that tech would make them an instantly viable “cloud” competitor. Worth thinking more about, if only because it would irritate Google.

      …[Server Maker]. (SGI? Supermicro?) Go into super-tight-stacked totally controlled servers and give both Cisco and Oracle heart palpitations.

      No, I suspect none of the above, truthfully. Apple’s MO is to make things (preferably CE products) that operate well with Apple, and who cares if they work with anyone else. I’d be far more likely to believe that Jobs will use this money to finally put to bed one of the longest running Mac complaints. “You can’t game on Apple, so it’s not worth buying.” Instead of buying a game dev or suchlike…

      Apple games console. (Maybe reusing the failed Apple TV brand as Apple TV 2.0 or suchlike?) It meets the Apple MO: it’s a consumer electronics device. It doesn’t “enhance” or “add value/get you bigger bank for your buck” to anything else they make. Rather gets you to buy a new device that “compliments” you existing Apple stack of CE devices. Instead of buying games in a store, you’d download them from the apple App Store. The marketing and “incentives” to game devs alone might well burn a hole in that $40B, let alone the R&D.

      Worth thinking about…

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Overconfidence?

    "When we think about big, bold things, we know that if we needed to acquire something, a piece of the puzzle, to make something big and bold a reality, we could write a check for it"

    I know Apple are very secretive, but it almost sounds too carefree. Hope jobs knows what he's talking about.

  9. fnkyfnstr
    Jobs Horns

    Best Idea Yet

    How about giving some of it back to the people who have over paid for their mediocore technology.

    Yep me included.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    I hope so

    love him or hate him, Apple without jobs would be buried 6' under by now.

    1. Solomon Grundy

      Maybe

      Jobs is doing a great job (haha) these days but don't forget he was single-handily responsible for nearly destroying the company not once, but twice.

      I keep waiting for him to slip on a $40bn banana peel and tank the whole thing.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Gates Halo

      Love em or hate em

      Apple without Gates would have been six foot under years ago.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Gates Halo

        Best Investment ever

        You're right, Gates invested $200m ten years ago, thats now effectively turned into $40bn now, so Microsoft should turn round and ask for a damn large portion of that back seeing as Apple were going to the wall without the $200m in the first place.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Video Technology

          Wasn't that money paid as part of a legal deal in respect of certain video/streaming tech ?

        2. OffBeatMammal
          Gates Halo

          sadly for MSFT

          they sold off their AAPL investment quite a while back

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    They could buy off some of the UK debt...

    £25b should be a sizeable chunk out of our national debt, and they could use it to mandate their kit in schools, governments, public buildings etc. Sales opportunity...

    He could then be made Prime Minister on behalf of a grateful nation; after all, he is known as a "passionate and forceful" leader as well...

    1. David Webb

      Not quite no

      25billion is a drop in the ocean, wouldn't even pay the interest. We're about £1,000billion in debt so that's 2.5% roughly.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Down

        Bugger

        Thats a really, big, debt then. I remember when a Billion was worth something.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Debt

          If you want to have a little weep at the UK's deficit - take a look at this graphic:

          http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-billion-pound-o-gram/

          1. jolly

            Nice graph

            But the scaling of the blocks seem to have been skewed in many cases (the budget deficit block is 2.5 times the size of the African debt but monetarily only 1.4 times bigger). In fact many of the blocks don't seem to be to scale when comparing their actual values with their areas.

            But nice graph anyway I spose.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Megaphone

        Fully loaded debt

        £3,000,000,000,000 -- three trillion to you and me, three thousand billion, three million millions.

  12. JeffV

    Jobs for President

    A few weeks ago the US Supreme Court decided that corporations were allowed to invest in the political process, supporting candidates and lobbying.

    It's not a big leap to imagine a corporation deciding that they wanted to be President and $40B is enough to get Apple elected as prez, with Mr Jobs as Apple's Representative on Earth.

    With Apple as President, the people of the USA would enjoy a well designed health-care system. There would be no more crashes. The government would focus on a single issue until it was satisfactorily sorted, or something more important happened; there would be no multitasking. Only glowingly positive press would be permitted. All grievances would have to form an orderly queue but Apple's decision would be final. It would be expensive, but citizens would universally agree that it was easily worth the trouble. Small changes would be treated as major revolutions and would be required to be written about in breathless tones. The military would have stylish, glossy hardware.

    No opposition would be brooked.

    Uh-oh. I may have given Ballmer an idea. The MS Presidency: a celebration of the mediocre with a lot of marketing about the innovation but no changes. 'I'm a voter and an MS President was my idea.'

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Alien

      already there!

      "Uh-oh. I may have given Ballmer an idea. The MS Presidency: a celebration of the mediocre with a lot of marketing about the innovation but no changes. 'I'm a voter and an MS President was my idea.'"

      Lets see - nothing happens unless there is a huge amount of bloat for very little useful "improvement" AND anything you want to work is basically broken.

      Sorry - we already have a MS Government. (Although it might be lots of other big companies ...)

  13. Ralph B
    Jobs Halo

    The Smell of Money

    Steve better spend it soon, otherwise Carl Icahn will be sniffing around, buying shares, demanding a place on the board, and ruining the company, like Motorola and Yahoo! before.

  14. Prag Fest
    Jobs Halo

    Splash the cash

    Go on, go mad, treat yourself to a new pair of Levi's.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    BruuHahahaha.... Apple falls on Golden Times..its Time for the...

    50-foot tall SOLID GOLD Statue of SJ himself...

    since hes now richer and more famous(and still breathing) than Michael Jackson.

    failing that, they could always buy up Apple records, lock stock and the entire Beatles IP to boot in one go AND still have change for that new statue.

    1. Marcus Aurelius
      Go

      Buy up Apple records

      Certainly would prevent any future trademark issues.

    2. Thyl Engelhardt

      Well

      according to a very very rough calculation, that might cost around 30 bio USD. So, Apple would still have the money to develop OX XI :-)

  16. twelvebore
    Badgers

    Content

    My money would be on them buying a media company (Time Warner is about $40bn from what I can see). Need lots of content for that $1bn data centre to stream to all those iP[ao]ds.

    1. Ed

      Hm, no

      Them buying a media company would jeopardise their relationship with all the other media companies. They need to remain somewhat impartial, if they want to sell content from a wide range of providers.

  17. Neil Paterson

    My enemy's enemy is my friend...

    ...so given Google's spat with China, hell, why not buy China?!

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Obviously...

    They need to save up the $40billion for the up and coming anti-trust case, also to pay for all the patent cases against them, I figure after all that's sorted, the $50billion company will be worth.... a fiver.

  19. Solomon Grundy
    Joke

    Big and Bold

    Like a giant iPod Touch maybe?

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    $40bn

    I think Steve should build a state of the art hospital with thousands of beds and a whole floor full of MRI machines, then stubbornly refuse to open it because he doesn't want dying people to ruin his 1337 designs with their pale skin and saggy limbs

    He can have it fully staffed with doctors and nurses, keeping them there doing nothing indefinitely then just to be extra tasteless he can get adverts projected onto the moon "Don't come to the iHospital because we don't want your type there"

    1. Marvin the Martian
      WTF?

      Why?

      Just, why? This post must be telling us something about your psychology, but I'm not convinced any of us wants to know.

  21. DZ-Jay

    Re: Extra-planet stores

    >> "Perhaps the firm is contemplating a chain of extra-Earth Apple stores to catch the nascent space tourism trade [...]"

    Ha, ha! You jest, but surely you know that if Jobs decides to promote space tourism and extra-planet computing Tomorrow, everybody will be building iRocket-wanna-be's by next year--right after they ridicule him for an ostensibly stupid idea.

    -dZ.

  22. TeeCee Gold badge
    Joke

    Message to shareholders.

    Steve's mystery Next Big Thing will be the iFuckedofftoantiguawithyourmoney.

  23. tkreyche

    tkreyche

    New corporate tower complex on Alcatraz Island! Access via secure hovercraft.

  24. Bob Greenwood
    Jobs Halo

    The fruits of capiltalism

    They should buy a telecoms co - ORANGE - a dance studio - PINEAPPLE then RIM (for BLACKBERRY) and so on.....

    (Saintly Jobs because it looks like the rim of that top hat)

  25. tkreyche

    Alcatraz!

    New corporate tower complex on Alcatraz Island! Access via secure hovercraft. Easily keep rogue employees in line.

  26. Daniel 1

    ORLY?

    "Shareholders usually get antsy when companies cash piles grow too large, and start demanding execs do something to return the value to... them."

    Oh really? Read about Microsoft, much?

  27. Neil Greatorex
    Grenade

    GEC

    Anyone remember what happened to them?

    They had a ginormous pile of real cash, then Weinstock retired.

    Who was it that oversaw the biggest collapse in British Corporate history? Can't remember his name, but he's a nuLabour peer now I believe.

    Let's hope crApple spend the wonga before Jobs retires..

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just go and buy TiVo

    Then the Apple TV becomes a useful product.

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