That’s not the way they do it anymore at HP, by the way - that habit having been broken by Fiorina, Hurd, and now Apotheker, though the last can’t really be blamed because the damage was mostly done before he came on watch. The less you paid out to shareholders (both of them) he decided, the more growth could be funded internally. Going further, Packard, as the money guy, didn’t like the Wall Street trend of taking on corporate debt to fund growth. The founders could easily have demanded dividends or even, I suppose, stock buy-backs, but they were earning plenty of money and preferred to let it ride. Starting in the late 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was raking-in the dough but it was at the time also a privately-held company with just two shareholders - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. The Silicon Valley corporate tendency to not pay dividends and instead accumulate vast quantities of cash was pioneered by Dave Packard at HP. I don’t think Steve intends to make any major acquisitions at all, though that says nothing about a post-Steve Apple. I think Apple has raised all that money for the sole purpose of…. And maybe Apple will buy Hulu (actually, I don’t think so, but let’s assume they do) but that will still leave Steve with $74+ billion, so the Apple money story won’t be going away. What’s it for? The predominant theory seems to be that Apple intends to make a huge acquisition and periodically there are rumors of Cupertino buying this big company or that, with Hulu being the latest supposed target. There’s a mystery about Apple’s cash and that mystery has to do with Steve’s strategy for holding all that money. But GE has almost $50 billion more than Apple, so where are all the GE stories? Yes, the government is broke and yes, Apple has a lot of cash. We won’t see President Obama asking Steve Jobs for a loan, nor will we see Steve Jobs offering one.
This coincidence means precisely nothing to either outfit. All of us were reminded over and over and over during the last few days that Apple has more cash on hand than does the U.S.
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