Carl Icahn Values Apple Inc. at More Than $1 Trillion, Your Turn, Bitcoin

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by Eugenia Romanenko · 3 min read
Carl Icahn Values Apple Inc. at More Than $1 Trillion, Your Turn, Bitcoin
Photo: LudoV/Flickr

Major Apple Inc shareholder Carl Icahn said the iPhone maker’s stock should be trading at $216, far above its record high of $124.92 hit on Wednesday, February 11, 2015. Is Bitcoin going to struggle for supremacy?

Speaking about world’s most important companies, it’s impossible not to mention Apple Inc. This company is valued at $700 billion currently. And it looks like it’s going to speed up the pace. Mr. Icahn, one of Apple’s top 10 investors, says that Apple Inc. should be trading at 20 times earnings per share, which taken together with net cash of $22 per share works out to $216 per share.

In a letter to his Twitter followers, Mr. Icahn says: “This is why we continue to own approximately 53 million shares worth $6.5 billion, and why we have not sold a single share. Also, to the extent Apple introduces a TV in FY 2016 or FY 2017, we believe this 20X multiple is conservative.”

Moreover, Icahn has long urged the company to buy back more shares and increase its dividend. In October, he noted  that Apple shares could double in value and urged the board to buy back more shares using its cash pile.

As for the company’s achievements, we can’t help but mention Apple Pay which was announced on September 9, 2014.  Since then, this relatively new payment system has been discussed a lot. It’s developing and becoming huge. For instance, Retail Customer Service reports about JetBlue Airways’ plans to be the first major domestic carrier in the U.S. to accept Apple Pay.

In September last year, CNBC published an article trying to answer whether Apple Pay was going to kill bitcoin:

“The concept of a “tokenization” or a one-time card number that does not transmit personal data is a similar concept to the Bitcoin blockchain. Certainly technology purists will argue that the blockchain technology at the heart of Bitcoin is superior, but to the consumer, the difference is indistinguishable.”

Despite the criticism, Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP) is interested in accepting Bitcoin. It proves the fact that Bitcoin remains important and is growing as well.

According to Wences Casares, serial entrepreneur and a star of the Silicon Valley bitcoin scene, Bitcoin is likely to become even bigger than the internet. Mr Casares told Business Insider that “in terms of the transferability, it [Bitcoin] is revolutionary”:

“it’s better than gold in every way except in terms of fungibility. If someone offers you two identical gold coins, you truly shouldn’t care which one they give you. It’s exactly the same. Truly fungible. In the case of bitcoin, each bitcoin contains in it its entire history within, right?

If you go to Africa or Latin America, parts of Asia, and you sit down with not even a poor person, just an average person, and you ask, ‘Look, what would you prefer — free access to information [which they’re getting now with their phones] or a secure place to store the fruits of your labor and to receive and make payment? If they didn’t have either, which was true until recently, they would choose the second because it is more relevant to them.”

Mr. Casares proves his statement saying that we live in a world in which there are 5 billion people with a phone but without a bank account or a credit card. These people cannot participate in global economy. “That’s why for 5 billion people, I think that bitcoin will be more relevant than the internet,” concludes Casares.

“Just 500,000 people own bitcoins,” writes BitScan’s Brandon Hurst. “That figure could easily grow by 100-fold, or even 1,000-fold, in the medium-term future, if bitcoin is widely adopted as an internet currency, let alone the default online medium of exchange.”

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