Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital over a went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in cash — that Apple holds and Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, although execs have indicating that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous shareholders, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until it decides though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ, so they could be super close to work per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall houses for 11,500 workers at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including: Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion) and LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion) Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 biilion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked from Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sachs’ 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say sequester.

* Apple could buy $329 16GB, Wi-Fi mini iPads for 416,413,374 people or everyone in US 315,429,318, plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each and call it a day.

* Apple could use one dollar bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Or — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

Categorised as: Chief Digital Officer | Digital Media | Feedster

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