Think of Scrooge McDuck, the money-mad Disney character, who loves nothing more than sitting atop the pile of gold coins in his basement vault.
Let's say each coin weighs one ounce, making each worth about $350 at current prices.
Now imagine the fowl capitalist strutting on a tottering mountain of 153 million gold coins.
That's the awesome, breath-taking size of Microsoft's corporate nest egg, some $53.5 billion socked away for a rainy day.
It's the largest cash hoard of any non-financial public company in the United States, built almost entirely by Microsoft's twin virtual monopolies: the Windows operating system for personal computers and the Office suite for such familiar tasks as word processing and spreadsheets.
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