Apple becomes the first $1T company • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#301

Post by petra » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:11 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #267

_pferreir_ wrote: post #246

Is this supposed to be good news? I see lots of excitement in this thread, but isn't having a single company worth so much money a sign that we are, as a society, failing to create an economy that is truly competitive and fair? We've already got banks that are too big to fail, soon we might have private companies that are humongous to the point of having the same status.

Turning that argument around, in a fair and competitive market would it be impossible for a company to grow to a $1T valuation? Do you think the majority of Apple's $1T valuation is attributable to abuse of government regulation or patents?

We know that networked technology businesses are mono/duopolistic by nature. So even if there are 10 amazing competitors, only 2 will survive, and they will be very protected from future competition.

This seems unfair.

And yes, that's a big reason behind why Apple is a $1T company.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#302

Post by harryh » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:13 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #251

rayiner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, the net present value of the US economy plus assets, which is probably pushing a quadrillion dollars.

No, 5 to 1 has been the ratio in recent decades. I know this was true in 1990s when I studied this issue, and it could not have changed that much in 20 years. So 100 trillion would be my assumption.

I wonder how that breaks down into categories. Some quick googling reveals the following:

~30 trillion in residential real estate

~6 trillion in commercial real estate

~30 trillion in pubic company value

Other big buckets I guess would be undeveloped land & private companies.

~100T sounds pretty plausible but I feel like I'm missing a big bucket or two. Not sure what though.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#303

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

chickenbane wrote: post #149

rayiner wrote: post #54

Good for it. Becoming a trillion dollar company selling quality products people love. Not data mining everything about your life and using it for advertising (Google), ruthlessly destroying competition (Microsoft), or destroying the environment (Exxon). How old fashioned.

I'm an Apple fan - congratulations to Apple - but on the other hand Apple being the biggest company in the world is pretty uninspiring. After seeing Tesla build a mass market electric car factory, or SpaceX launching a Roadster into space, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank making phones and headphones feels like a wasted opportunity.

Tesla will only be inspiring once they can produce a product at a price that people are willing to pay and do it profitably.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#304

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:21 PM UTC

themihai wrote: post #199

ryanmercer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's tax they might generate, It's tax that would not have been paid if Apple did not exist. >and duties go right into the price of the products, And if the government said "Apple must now pay 50% on every dollar they make" guess what would go right into the price of the products... >employees pay income tax. Business owners must pay the federal government 6.2% of every dollar their worker makes until that annual…

You can also credit Apple for the companies that will never see the light because Apple had the tax advantage(not to mention some of its abusive practices towards competition/little guy)

Because the little guy could have created an operating system, a global supply chain, designed thier own processors, etc. if it wasn’t because of Apple?

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#305

Post by pliny » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

Tactic wrote: post #296

pliny wrote: post #56

>“Apple’s $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018,” said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. “That puts this company in perspective.” The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).

He said it is "equal to" not that it accounts for. I believe the analogy is valid, though can be easily misleading.

The units are different, it would be like saying that my car is half as wide as it is fast.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#306

Post by ben174 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #299

ben174 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I tell everyone when they kick themselves for not buying BTC when it was $0.25. You would have sold them the second they hit $1.00. The only people I know who got rich off BTC are those who found an old wallet on an old drive in their garage.

Define "rich". I know someone who had an almost 20x ROI with BTC and is still holding it since 2013 I think. That is _VERY_ good ROI, I think. But the invested sum was a paltry $1000 that was a lot for him at the time.

Your sibling posted a good example:

https://twitter.com/gregschoen/status/70261648811761665?lang...

Had he held on to his until the very peak, he'd be sitting on $30 million. That's rich.

With BTC, 20x isn't that crazy. I'm talking about 50,000x if you dig up an old enough wallet.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#307

Post by rayiner » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

soared wrote: post #244

onion2k wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not free. They just don't cost money . Arguably they're very expensive.

And literally billions of people don't have the money to spend on products like that but are able to use them because they can pay with their data, which has no cash value to them.

That doesn't really make any sense, right? How can those folks' data be worth very much if they don't have the money to pay a subscription fee for Google?

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#308

Post by _pferreir_ » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #267

_pferreir_ wrote: post #246

Is this supposed to be good news? I see lots of excitement in this thread, but isn't having a single company worth so much money a sign that we are, as a society, failing to create an economy that is truly competitive and fair? We've already got banks that are too big to fail, soon we might have private companies that are humongous to the point of having the same status.

Turning that argument around, in a fair and competitive market would it be impossible for a company to grow to a $1T valuation? Do you think the majority of Apple's $1T valuation is attributable to abuse of government regulation or patents?

> in a fair and competitive market would it be impossible for a company to grow to a $1T valuation?

It depends on your definition of "fair". In my view, such a market would be regulated as to avoid that companies become too big to the point of turning into black holes that suck everything around them.

Money attracts top talent and allows companies to buy out possible competitors. That in turn generates more money.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#309

Post by foobarchu » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

24gttghh wrote: post #257

Analemma_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Ahh the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra. What an awful name it had. An mp3 player one could slap a larger 2.5" HDD into, and with a replaceable battery. Mine still sits on my desk, a monument to a forgone era. The case front and back are aluminum and removable, which made it easy to spray-paint :)

I do believe all of those are also attributes of the ipod. I definitely replaced both the battery and hardware inside of iPods back in the day, the only downside is that you risked dinging the seal getting it open.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#310

Post by RealityVoid » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #277

privacypoller wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get your causation mixed up though. Most of those people are actually crazy, wild and broke.

It never made "sense" to invest in bitcoin, and it still doesn't. If you had done so, you would have made money, but it was a "bad" bet. It wasn't a company, you had no real information to go off of. No earnings reports, no statements, nothing. It was as blind a bet as you can get. If you were technically knowledgeable in the area I guess you could have "predicated" that it would be used to buy drugs and thus go up i…

I agree about the saltiness, but not so about BTC being a bad bet, considering it held great promise for a relatively small investment and, I myself, was sold on the way BTC was presented by Satoshi. No matter what happens to BTC now, at least from it's founder's point of view, BTC is a huuuge success.