There're are a lot of annoyances that come with being a public company. Absent shareholders, SEC, quarterly and annual reports, conference calls and the like, they could probably spend more time doing what they want to do -- create products in the airtight vault and release them when and if they feel the timing is right.

But yeah, stock price times outstanding shares looks like an impossible some of money.

I almost wonder if Apple doesn't have to make some sort of drastic change like this in the future. There's no way it can perpetually continue to show the kind of growth it has in the past -- there simply isn't an infinite number of markets in the world to conquer, and saturation will come eventually. Going private would certainly save the company from the inevitable valuation decline we began to see hints of after the last earnings report.

But man, how great would it be if Apple was free from the shackles of repeatable, consistent profitability and could make a huge investment into doing something crazy and genuinely innovative?

Tim just nailed it. As cash rises and value drops, the distance to buyout shortens. All Apple has to do is keep making record profits while simultaneously disappointing the madness that is Wall Street and they're in.

This Einhorn stuff is fascinating. It's highlighting just how conservative Apple is with its cash. Compare that with Amazon which spends pretty much all of it and gets rewarded for it.

Given the hammering Apple is already taking on Wall Street, perhaps it is time to be less conservative and do more interesting things with the cash (beyond stock buybacks and dividends). I don't expect Apple to do anything insane, but invest in more infrastructure (iCloud!), supply chain, and R&D (though they've proven how well you can do with a relatively small amount spent on R&D compared to competitors, so maybe that efficiency doesn't scale). $13B in profit isn't good enough apparently, so blow it all!

I think Tim has it spot on and his closing paragraph is really intriguing. I think the price is the biggest mountain to climb however something echoes in my mind about taxes. Apple and US taxes have an interesting history. Would going private make it more difficult to keep the taxman at bay?

All of the (attempted) price manipulation lately (obvious BS journalism), I wouldn't blame Apple for going private at some point.

Point is (off of Tim's point), it seems they *may* have hit some sort of high mark. Revenues will continue to grow. But without some sort of new product line, they probably won't surge again. And margins are going the wrong way, so profit will stay flat or grow only slightly y/y. Of course, there will be new products. But will they be iPhone-level in terms of revenue/profit? For Wall Street, they have to be. An iWatch/Television may not be good enough purely from a bottom line perspective. The iPhone is *that* good of a business.

So who cares, Wall Street is going to be pissed regardless, spend away!

Before Cook initiated the dividend last year, in the back of my mind I always wondered if "going private" was not the reason for Apple's plan to just hoard its profits. Sort of "fuck you" insurance against Wall Street. (Even with the dividend, though, their cash continues to grow at an impressive rate. It's sort of a token dividend.)

Legally, I think it's impossible. A pipe dream. But culturally, Apple as an institution does seem better suited to being a privately held company. As Ryan stated in the opening message in this thread, in a sense they're already the world's most private public company.

And it seems clear as the years go by that Apple's strategy and goals are not aligned with those of Wall Street.

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Just for fun, with infinite guessing:

Their Market Cap is $450B. A typical buyout premium is about 25%-35% (from Googling). So lets call the buyout price $600B.

Current interest rates are 4.5%, but these huge loaners would be sacrificing diversification. About 7% is the historical S&P500 average annual return, so let's say the loaners demand 8% to outperform the market + 2% for less diversification. That's 10%. For a 20 yr $600B loan at 10%, payments would be $69.4B per year.

Last year, Apple's profits were an all-time record at $54B. And they would have "purchased" the $137B cash from the balance sheet. So, they must beat 2012's $54B profit, likely dip into the cash, and maintain it for 20 yrs. (Or get a longer loan.)

Quite a leap.