On Wednesday, Apple disclosed to the SEC as part of their Form 10-K filing, that they currently have $81,570,000,000 in cash, 13.2 million square feet of building space, and 60,400 full-time employees.
"This means that Apple pulled in $37.5 billion in cash profits in fiscal 2011. Not bad for a company that ‘missed’ industry estimates."writes The Next Web.
During Apple's earnings call in October, Tim Cook waved off Apple's mountains of cash, saying they weren't "burning a hole in our pocket" reports MacRumors. He went on to emphasize that Apple was in no rush to decide what to do with the money, and that he was not "religious about holding or not holding cash." Apple's CFO said that 66 percent of the cash was kept overseas for tax reasons.
But $81.5 billion is a lot of cash no matter where you keep it. In fact, it's more cash than the U.S. government has. In their last Form Q-10 filing in July, Apple reported that they had over $75 billion in cash, whereas the government had less than $74 billion, according to the Financial Post.
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While Apple may be a notorious cash hoarder, despite what Tim Cook says, it's not as though Apple has millions of dollars lying around like a scene in "Scarface." According to the 10-K report, that $81.5 billion is made up of "cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities." This means that only some of it is in cash, and the rest is in either short or long-term investments.
But what if they did have it in cash? What could Apple do with that $81.5 billion? They could pay for the U.S. to gather intelligence for one year, or fund the National Cancer Institute for almost sixteen years, or send over four-hundred thousand people to space.