I mean Apple clearly makes a bunch of purchases, and uses its cash to doing things like buying supply capacity, and ensuring it has cash to weather storms. But

I mean Apple clearly makes a bunch of purchases, and uses its cash to doing things like buying supply capacity, and ensuring it has cash to weather storms. But then there's excess cash - they produce dividends and do stock buybacks to return cash to shareholders. As to your claim: We know exactly how much they're worth. Those quarterly results they issue are required to be accurate, and tell you exactly how many assets they have and exactly how much debt they have. The problem is at this point the value of shares on the stock market is detached from the underlying asset/debt ratio, and is instead based on traders beliefs about how other traders will behave. This is most apparent on for stock in companies that don't return cash, so the shares themselves don't produce a return until they're sold. OTOH I just have standard 401k style investment accounts so what do I know? :D