Apple reported a cash pile of $256.8 billion in the second fiscal quarter, up by more than $10 billion from the last quarter.
To put it in relative terms, the spending cash Apple now has on hand is larger than any US company is recent history.
It’s larger than the market value of Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and General Electric, despite the company reporting lower than expected revenue this quarter. The sum even tops the GDP of any African nation except Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa, according to Wikipedia.
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| 2016 Rank | Country | Nominal GDP ($ billions) |
Nominal GDP per capita(US$) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Nigeria |
537.966 | 2,929.525 | |
| 2 |  Egypt |
330.765 | 3,740.249 | 2015 data[7] |
| 3 |  South Africa |
266.213 | 4,768.235 | |
| 4 |  Algeria |
165.974 | 4,082.572 | |
| 5 |  Morocco |
108.096 | 3,195.564 | |
| 6 |  Sudan |
93.729 | 2,366.970 | |
| 7 |  Angola |
81.497 | 3,150.476 | |
| 8 |  Ethiopia |
67.435 | 739.444 | |
| 9 |  Kenya |
64.688 | 1,422.411 | [9] |
| 10 |  Tanzania |
45.899 | 943.797 | |
| 11 |  Tunisia |
43.989 | 3,919.332 |
This means Apple could buy a number of countries with considerable change to spare.
The company could buy the $51 billion Tesla to drive its self-driving car program forward, $65 billion Netflix to plug into its own streaming hardware and compete with Amazon Prime, or even outright purchase the over $180 billion Walt Disney Company. All of this would be possible despite having to pay shareholders $88 billion in dividends.
Apple needs to be regulated by the United Nations!
