Though Wall St. didn’t seem terribly impressed, Apple last week delivered yet another stellar earnings report. Riding on the back of strong iPhone sales, Apple posted revenue of $51.5 billion and a quarterly profit of $11.1 billion. As Tim Cook noted, “fiscal 2015 was Apple’s most successful year ever.”
By the time Apple’s October quarter came to a close, the company found itself sitting on a cash hoard worth $206 billion, a figure that’s higher than the GDP of many countries. With $206 billion, Apple could theoretically afford to give every single person in the United States (assuming a population of 318.8 million) $646, effectively the cost of a brand new iPhone.
Even more interesting is that Apple has enough cash to buy every single team from every major sports league in the world. Here’s how the calculations all break down.
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For starters, let’s start with the four major sports leagues in the U.S. Beginning with football, all 32 NFL teams are worth approximately $37.2 billion. Meanwhile, the NBA’s 29 teams are cumulatively worth about $32 billion. Somewhat surprisingly, the 30 teams that comprise Major League Baseball are worth approximately $36 billion. And pulling up the rear, the value of all NHL teams checks in at $14.7 billion.
Together, Apple would clearly have more than enough cash to buy every single football, basketball, baseball, and hockey team, a purchase that would cost them $119 billion.
Even if we throw soccer into the mix, snatching up even more teams is hardly a match for Apple’s bank account. Apple could quickly acquire all 20 teams in Major League Soccer (MLS) for $3.14 billion and still have more than enough money to purchase the 20 top international soccer teams in the world, including heavy hitters like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Manchester United. All told, acquiring the top 20 soccer teams in the world would cost an estimated $23.2 billion.
Adding everything together, Apple has enough cash to purchase every major sports team in the world and still have $59.7 billion in cash left over to play with.
While the values of every soccer team in all of the top leagues aren’t publicly available, there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that Apple could easily purchase every single team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, NHL along with every team from La Liga, the English Premier League, and the Bundesliga.
