Apple is scheduled to report its second fiscal quarter earnings overnight and the company will announced that it has more than US$250 billion in cash, most of it stashed outside the US.
A number of published reports said the company would make this announcement; such an amount is greater than the foreign exchange reserves of both the US and Canada.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple could buy Time, Cirrus Logic, Lions Gate Entertainment, Twitter, Viacom, Skyworks, Pegatron, Toshiba's Memory Chip business, Snap, and Ford, and still have US$34 billion left over.
Apple had US$246 billion in cash in December and in the last three months of that year it earned about US$3.6 million an hour .
Chief executive Tim Cook told the Irish state broadcaster RTE last year that he intended to repatriate the cash kept outside the US.
When inquiries were made about this, an Apple spokeswoman said this reflected Cook's optimism that the US would make changes to its tax rate in 2017 in order to make it attractive for the company to take the cash back to the US.
According to The Intercept, Apple has lobbied Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for American companies to bring back cash into the country after paying a much smaller percentage as tax.
Apple had a bankruptcy scare in the 1990s and the late Steve Jobs had to borrow from Microsoft to avoid closing down.
But thereafter, the company has gone from strength to strength and the iPhone has helped no end, with more than a billion devices sold in the decade since its introduction. Apple now takes 91% of all profits in the smartphone sector.