Apple Inc (AAPL)

[langostino]

dilleet - that's a common misperception

Once a company is public and provided there is greater demand (interested buyers) than supply (sellers looking to liquidate), there is literally no value one way or the other of who owns the shares. Apple didn't provide a bit of benefit to AKAM by holding less than 5% of their float.

And once the capitalization of the IPO has happened, there is no additive value to a strategic partnership of Apple holding a bunch of stock certificates. To the contrary, once the working capital has been raised in the IPO, the company is benefitted only by additional cash. Ironically, as I mentioned before, Apple was in a perfect position to further the strategic partnership by chunking in additional cash ... as a customer -- fueled by sale of those certificates. That would have meant no loss of working capital to AKAM, and lots of new revenues.