Thanks in part to an incessantly shrinking float, Apple just became the first publicly-traded company to be worth more than $1 trillion…
The line in the sand was $207.05 (based on Apple’s most recently updated share count)
And once it tagged $207.05, the sellers hit…
And thanks to global ETF demand combined with a buyback-driven shrinking float and rising earnings…
Tim Cook is now the CEO of a trillion-dollar company…
Tim Cook won…
Bezos won’t be happy but at least the central bank money is being put to good use…
Incidentally, as we noted previously, Apple’s unprecedented slow-motion MBO has another key function: as Bloomberg’s David Wilson writes, the decline in share count is responsible for 42% of the stock’s gain from the end of 2013 through Tuesday, as shown in the chart. And, Wilson notes, “as Apple nears $1 trillion in value, a threshold no U.S. company has ever crossed, the gap may only get wider.”
To be sure, Apple is not alone: a study published by the National Employment Law Project and the Roosevelt Institute found that U.S. companies spent 60% of net income on repurchases, money that could have been used for pay increases, reinvesting in company growth or general R&D spending – between 2015 and 2017.
Then again, Apple shareholders are certainly delighted that instead of doing any of those things, AAPL focused on what it does best, at least in recent years: rest on its laurels, borrow the best technology created by its competitors, and use the billions in cash this generates every quarter to buy back its own stock.
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