Burton Speaks: AAPL (or "What to do with $25 billion?")

Irony: i·ro·ny n The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

I'm Burton from Portland, Oregon, United States. I'm 33 and live in the Portland Metro Area. I work hard. I drive fast. I play often. I'm sarcastic, appreciate irony, and find humor in even the darkest of events. I'm non-traditional. I question authority. I'm a know-it-all and a planner. And most days, I wake up thinking the world is full of fundamentally good people... and have a lot of problems when I'm proven wrong. Any other questions?

As a bit of an Apple fan, I knew they were set to release their quarterly results in a conference call today. While the news was (as usual) exceptionally good, what I found interesting was the fact that Apple has about $25 billion dollars in cash laying around*.

So what does this mean?

Well, first off, it seems that Apple has a pretty sizable "rainy day" fund set aside. That's good. Secondly, however, it means that they could have a lot of fun.

Today, they could:

Purchase GM, Ford, and Chrysler LLC and still have about $12 billion left over.

Pay for a couple months of the war in Iraq.

Buy 1/28th of the latest federal bailout.

Buy each of the 15.9 million college students in the U.S. a new MacBook (and have money left over, assuming they get the education discount on the purchase.)

Finally, in a cruel twist of fate, they could simply purchase Dell and, if nothing else, shut it down.+

Of course, this is all well and good, but Bill Gates could still come up with more cash if he needed to...

*A look at the financial statements indicates that this is really cash, cash equivalents, accounts receivable, and short term investments. In other words, extremely current assets.
+ Let it be known that I noticed that they had more cash laying around than Dell's market capitalization. Once I was looking at Dell's page, however, I saw the link at Mac Daily News which outlined my thinking better than I could do it myself.