76.2 Big Ones

Apple Inc now has somewhere north of $76.2 billion in the bank, which is one huge pile of money. Speculation abounds as to what they may do with that much cash: buying companies, investing in research, giving shareholders a dividend...etc. What they are actually doing with it right now seems to be expanding rapidly in a worldwide recession.

 

Here's a humorous look at some of the things they could blow it on instead, if they so desired. This is from TUAW, an Apple blog:

 

 

Buy a fleet of 203 A-380 jumbo jets

At a price tag of $375.3 million each, the huge A-380 can carry up to 525 people in a standard class configuration. Apple's airline could simultaneously carry almost 107,000 people at a time, or over two times the number of employees the company has. This purchase would take a long time to happen, considering that only 53 of the monster jets have been built.

Give an iPad 2 (16 GB Wi-Fi) to every person in Japan and Taiwan

You could buy 152.7 million iPads with $76.2 billion, which means every man, woman, and child in the two Asian countries listed here could have an iPad 2 and there would still be some bucks left over. (Why those two countries? I needed two countries with a combined population of about 150 million.)

Treat every Apple employee to seven flights into space

That Genius at the local Apple Store is already the envy of many, but wouldn't it be even more impressive if she was also an astronaut? Beginning next year, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is offering suborbital space flights on SpaceShip Two for $200,000 a pop. Apple has enough money to send every employee on seven SpaceShip Two flights each and still have money left over. Sir Richard might need to beef up his fleet a bit...

Buy HP

By a strange coincidence, HP's market capitalization just happened to be around $76.1 billion on 7/22/11. Here's a chance to put the TouchPad out to pasture, kill the Pre, and make printers that really work well with Apple devices.

Turn Cupertino into Fort Knox West

Gold prices were at an all-time high of $1,600 per ounce on Friday, but Apple could buy a lot of the stuff -- 2,976,562.5 pounds (1,350,146.0 kilograms). That's about a third of what's stored in the United States Bullion Repository in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Buy every MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA franchise

Now this would be very frivolous, but Apple could buy every professional baseball ($15.7 billion), football ($22.8 billion), hockey ($4.9 billion) and basketball ($7.7 billion) team in the USA and still have about $25 billion in change.