These U.S. Companies Have Billions in Cash 💵

What we’re showing

This graphic ranks the top 20 U.S. companies by their amount of cash on hand. Market capitalizations were included for additional perspective.

Data comes from FinanceCharts.com, and is as of Dec. 13, 2024. Cash Holdings includes both cash & cash equivalents (short-term liquid investments such as T-bills).

Financial service companies

Among the top 20 list are several financial service companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. There are several reasons why they have such large cash holdings:

• Banks are required to maintain a certain level of liquid assets to avoid crises
• Cash is needed to facilitate their daily operations such as market-making and trading
• High cash reserves can also signal financial strength

Technology companies

Tech companies also have very large cash reserves thanks to their high profitability. Their cash can be used for expensive R&D (developing AI), infrastructure (building data centers), acquisitions (e.g. Microsoft buying LinkedIn), or stock buybacks.

As shown in one of our previous graphics, Apple spent $83 billion repurchasing shares between June 2023 to June 2024.