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Comment by kmonsen | Hacker News Reader

I think even if Apple went bankrupt in 5 years, what Tim Cook has achieved is extremely good. It was not sure at all that Apple would grow this much over 12 years. It is not clear Steve Jobs himself could have had this success.

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How would it even be possible for apple to do so

Apple's total comprehensive income was $24B in Q2. Their total assets were $332B, and total liabilities $270B. Assuming all product sales dropped to 0, they could make the best effort to liquidate assets, after which they'd only have $62B - which would last them a little over a year at $13.6B in quarterly operating expenses.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/...

A fair portion of that quarterly operating expense results in $20 billion a quarter in services revenue. I don't think those numbers intuitively reveal a plausible scenario where they are under in five years.

The link shows ~ < 50% of Apple's liabilities are current; assuming revenue dropped overnight to $0, I doubt they'd need to liquidate any assets, likely for multiple years.

It's an unrealistic & impractical scenario, obviously, but IMO it's more likely they'd want to increase their liabilities (and likely WOULD be able to - lol!) without touching their assets. It's actually an interesting & somewhat comical mind game, even if nothing else.

FWIW, I've no personal position.

I suppose if the product sales dropped to 0, a few mass firings would be in order. That should cut down that $13.6B operating expense drastically :)

China going to war would destroy most of Apple's production bases and this would force people to use Android due to Samsung being the best fabs not involved.

No iPhone no success. Cook is a good operations man and he's helped to maintain the success, but he did it by relying totally on China. Not a good long term move at all. He hasn't come up with a revolutionary new product, just improvements on the current iPhone.

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