Apple is one of the three most valuable companies in the world and is sitting on a pile of around $100,000,000,000 ($100 Billion). Execs at Apple are about to announce what they're going to spend all that money on. Ahead of that — we thought we'd try to provide a little context for just how much scratch that really is.
And context, to us, means cars. It turns out you can buy a lot of cars with that much money. We built one of those flashy infographic things to make this mind-blowing wad of cash make sense. UPDATE!
It turns out that's actually very hard to do.
For example, if you use the least expensive production car currently on the market — the $2,400 Tata Nano — you end up being able to buy over 33 million of them.
Just another large, difficult-to-grasp number? Hmm, that doesn't help.
But, if you use the most expensive production car on the market — the $2.4 million Bugatti Veyron SS) — you'll end up with a little over 40,000 of them.
That's at least a number that can be grasped.
Actually, you can do more than buy cars (and will probably have to since they're not making more than a small handful of Bugatti Veyron SS models).
But, what Apple really could do — if it really wanted to "Think Different" — would be to buy some car companies. And they actually could do it. They've got enough cash to buy all three U.S. automakers — and enough money to spend on paying back a decent-sized chunk of that auto bailout loan. Then they could build that "iCar" everyone keeps claiming they should build.
Check out the rest of the things Apple could be spending that money on in our infoporn to your left.
It turns out spending $100,000,000,000 is almost as hard as earning it.
UPDATE: Apple is going to pay a dividend of $2.65 a share and start a share buyback program. Booooooooooring.
Click on the graphic to embiggen.
Graphic By Jason Torchinsky/Jalopnik