That's 75 and nine noughts. "Billion" does not do it justice. Billion, trillion, squillion ... how can we possibly grasp its significance? Our experiences are of different orders of magnitude.
Just three weeks ago, the board of Microsoft announced it had surplus cash to requirements and would be giving some back to shareholders.
Some $75 billion(€61.1 billion), over four years, in the form of a one-time dividend payment in December of $32 billion, annual dividends of $3.5 billion, and a gradual buyback of some $30 billion of its own shares.
It is quite simply the biggest dividend payment in the history of capitalism by the richest company in the history of capitalism - Microsoft earns profit of $1.1 million an hour on revenues which will this year total some $36 billion. It has liquid cash reserves of a staggering $60 billion.
That figure - $75 billion - is equivalent to half the wealth created in the Irish economy last year, or 45 times the annual GDP of Rwanda.
It is four times as much as the total invested in the EU last year by US companies, and nearly 1½ times as much as the UN and World Bank have estimated is needed to rebuild Iraq.
$75 billion represents 1¼ times the total annual overseas development aid spend of the world's richest 26 states (OECD - 2002), and, distributed equally, it could mean $110 - on average a month's income - for each and every one of the 700 million men, women and children living in the world's least developed countries.
Of course, the suggestion is ridiculous - the fiduciary responsibility of Microsoft's board is to the owners of its 10 billion shares who would certainly sue at such improvidence.
(Bill Gates, however, will give all of his personal share of the dividend - $3.2 billion - to his family's charitable fund.)
Economists say the payment of $36 billion in dividends in December is large enough to provide a significant fillip to the giant US economy - last year President Bush tried the same with a mere $14 billion expansion in child credit.
And its timing, 15 days after the US elections, will mean that while Republican candidates will not feel the benefit, shareholders will be able to avail of the reduced tax ceiling on dividend payments - down from 35 to 15 per cent, courtesy of Bush tax cuts last year. (Bush, left to himself, would have done away altogether with the tax on dividends).
Faced with a stagnant share price and the need to trim profit projections, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer have decided their shareholders need a break. Dipping in to the company's mountain of liquid assets is the way - just enough to leave a $24 billion fighting fund should an appetising prospect for takeover swim by (last week rumour swept Japan - swiftly denied - that Gates had his eye on Nintendo).
The decisions also makes sense from a management perspective. Although still in the market for further acquisitions, research tends to show that managements with too much cash at their disposal become less choosy and make sloppier decisions about investment, particularly if straying from areas they know best. From a shareholder perspective, money sitting in the bank is scarcely the way to maximise returns.
The company is not alone in being awash with cash. Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, Mobil and Intel each have over $10 billion in the bank, while if you add up the cash held by the non-financial firms in the Standard and Poor's 500 it amounts to a very tidy $555 billion, more than half accumulated in the last five years. You can lead a capitalist to profit, but you can't make him invest ...
So what's your point, Mr Smyth, I hear you ask? You have a socialist aversion to profit? You begrudge farsighted investors a return?
Neither. But a "fair" return ...
Microsoft's super-profits have in no small measure been the result of its monopoly position in a market where, globally, 90 per cent of PC operating systems use its software. It has recently concluded a series of deals with federal, state and rival corporation lawyers that have effectively put years of litigation for abuse of monopoly powers behind it at a cost of a couple of billion. An appeal against an award of $600 million in respect of the company's battle with the EU is still pending but Microsoft has already put that cash aside - in any case the award, large though it may be, represents only 1 per cent of cash reserves.
And, in truth, a monopoly position conveys huge advantage on companies even when they obey the rules, an advantage which should be taxed for the benefit of society as a whole.
For, let us not forget, a large part of that dividend was generated here. Microsoft's European operations, based in Dublin, have a turnover of around $7 billion a year and may thus be responsible for up to a fifth of the company's profits.
Is it really so heretical to ask if we are getting our fair share?