Here’s another scary chart for you. Yesterday, Apple’s financial report came out. It’s a big, trendy, forward-looking American commercial company.
It has none of those so-called “traditional moral bonds” (and it’s even run by a gay man), and it owns no mineral wealth, natural resources, deposits, wells, or other diamonds hidden away in rocky caves. It has no “unique geographic position” and no “unique treasures of Siberia.”
Just ordinary shareholders, managers, developers, programmers, and advertising people. In other words, exactly the kind of people it has suddenly become fashionable in Russia to treat with contempt.
Now let’s compare Apple’s revenue with the revenues of Russia’s federal budget—the largest country in the world (with its diamonds, Siberia, and oil), whose leadership is trapped in hellish fantasies of global dominance and a worldwide confrontation with the West.
In other words, Apple earns more than the entire “state known as the Russian Federation.” And that’s despite the fact that, while Apple is the biggest company, it does not loom over the American economy the way Gazprom does over Russia’s—there are a substantial number of U.S. companies comparable to Apple in size.
Why is this chart scary? Because it shows yet again that what makes a country, a region, or a company rich is people—human capital—not oil and not the treasures of Siberia.
And here, every time you turn on the TV, some idiot official is yelling: America wants to grab our territory. Why the hell would America need this permafrost-covered land when it is already taking the most valuable thing of all—back in 2015, 265,000 people applied for green cards to move there.
And right away, for those who will say: well, they have iPhones, and we have Iskanders (Russian short-range ballistic missiles).
We cannot win an arms race for Iskanders if we do not have overall economic strength. As you can see, Apple—if its shareholders were to go insane—could buy itself far more Iskanders than Russia can. Especially given that Russia is running a 3% budget deficit, while Apple has a 40% profit margin.
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