Which Company Is the Largest? 378
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "Apple and Exxon are fighting it out to be the company with the largest market cap. Tuesday, Apple pulled ahead. It is hard to believe a tech company can beat out an oil giant, but is the market cap really the measure of the size/influence of a company? It is certainly the simplest metric to consider. Ars is running an excellent article on how to measure the size of a company. They discuss different metrics such as cash balance, revenue, number of employees, etc."
Re:How about volatility (Score:4, Informative)
What do you mean about volatility? Aside from Steve Jobs announcing his first medical leave to get a liver transplant in January 2008 and the economic recession hitting later that year, there haven't been any major drops in Apple's stock price. With the exception of the two cases I mentioned, you could have bought Apple stock at any point in the last five years, sold it a year later, and come out well ahead (and in those two cases, holding it for two years would have meant a major profit). It hasn't been a monotonic increase, but it's certainly on an upward trend at the moment, so even if there are fluctuations on a day-to-day basis, holding onto it for even a month or two is almost always enough to see a return on your investment.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=off&z=l&q=l&c= [yahoo.com]
Re:Evil tech companies with their huge profits (Score:4, Informative)
In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes [fool.com]; individuals paid over 100x that much.
Individuals paid 17.6 trillion dollars in taxes? The link said it was $1.8 trillion, which would make 10x, not 100x.