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Comment by us0r | Hacker News Reader

They have over 115 Billion cash on hand.

Yeah, and if that takes a $30B hit to settle past accounting issues, that’s still $30B no longer poised for an acquisition or on hand to settle some EU action next year.

Losing a quarter of your cash reserves for no gain isn’t going to ruin today’s business but it sure will frustrate existing strategies for the future.

You can acquire with shares though. They or they could raise 30Bn pretty easy.

>that’s still $30B no longer poised for an acquisition

They accumulate that much cash because there are no acquisitions to be had in the current economic climate. I can't imagine a $30B+ company that Microsoft could acquire without massive regulatory scrutiny.

Good! Hopefully Microsoft burns through as much of their cash paying penalties as possible and dies as a result, as they should've a decade+ ago.

But I bet a lot of that is in long term treasuries which, if you want to use them as legal tender, are kinda down in price right now (if you don't hold them til maturity). And if they need to take a loan to pay it, those bonds are going to be at fairly high rates. Overall, it's gonna be a stock price haircut for sure. I'm guessing at least 10-20% because of all the money they could have MADE with that money.

Random googling finds “Cash equivalents are any short-term investment securities with maturity periods of 90 days or less.”

They have $35 billion in Cash & Cash Equivalents.

Yep. Accounting standards dictate that a cash equivalent should be essentially as liquid as cash from the perspective of the holder. It’s safe to lump it in here.

Long-term treasuries are generally not considered "cash." Short-term, sure, but t-bills are doing fine.

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