Microsoft's $40 Billion On Hand

eMilkshake writes "CNN/Money magazine report here that Microsoft has more liquid reserves than 'Ford, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart have combined' and 'enough to buy the entire airline industry -- twice. Or all the gold in Fort Knox, four times over. It is enough to buy 23 space shuttles or every major professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey team in America.' This is thanks to (according to WinInfo Update) the fact that 'Microsoft handles its investments with an inhouse software application called--seriously--the Catastrophe Hedging Program 2.5.' I wonder what I would do with $40 billion?"

Comments

New MetaTroll?

[crisco]

You know that Troll that keeps posting all the math that shows BSD only has like 3 installations worldwide? And that other guy that posts to every other Microsoft story (posting to every one of them is too much) on how all those stock options are a grand pyramid scheme and Microsoft isn't worth so much after all?

They need to get together and come up with some good fuzzy math that shows how Microsoft will burn through that $40 billion in a week and make the DOJ irrelevant. Then we can all go home.

Re:What to do with $40e9?

[linzeal]

By what, overthrowing the governments including the united states that are preventing that? Neo-liberalism teaches that you can solve all problems with state welfare, it doesn't work.

Re:It's about tax evasion...

[GMontag]

Screwing over who by doing what? Hey, it is a business not a friggin charity. If YOU want to send every penny that YOU make to the IRS and thus avoid the pot/kettle comparison, feel free to do so.

Also, whoever on this thread proposed that corporations are required to distribute earnings is confusing the tax category of not-for-profit with for-profit organizations. Perhaps from some socialist dilusion that every penny made by productive elements of the economy needs to go through the feds for redistribution to Liberal Arts and Sciences departments, as well as other government welfare programs.

M$ Prisoner Rape?

[Baldrson]

Since the value of fiat currency is based on the government's ability to punish those who do not acquire it to pay legal obligations such as tax, and the ultimate form of punishment routinely carried out on behalf of the government against those who violate its will is HIV and Hepatitis-C infected ethnospecific prisoner gang-rape, one wonders whether the $40e9 cash on hand held by M$ would become less valuable by quite a large fraction were the government to suddenly get a conscience and abide by the 8th Amendment as a result.

Perhaps the secret "catastrophe" against which the legendary "Catastrophe Hedging Program 2.5" is "hedging" is the sudden cessation of cruel and unusual punishment as the ultimate power of the United States. How one hedges against such "catastrophic" losses is interesting to contemplate. Does, for example, Balmer have a pop-up web-cam viewer with CHP2.5 that gives him instant views of the prison "turf" of the most vicious and infectious prison gangs money can buy -- just to ensure they are "doing their job" for the Federal Reserve, IRS and M$?

Re:$40 billion?

[cmkrnl]

The world will be a much better place when natural selection has eliminated socialism.

Curmudgeon