A joke news article that Google was merging with Apple was erroneously published by Dow Jones this week, briefly affecting share prices.
The tone of the report and the putative price tag for Apple of $9bn, against the real enterprise value of $650bn, would quickly have alerted human traders that this was a spoof.
Yet there is a case for merging the world’s two highest-valued companies. Each wastes billions on endeavours the other has mastered. Google spent $1.1bn poaching phone engineers from HTC. It also pays Apple an estimated $3bn a year to install Google search as the default on iPhones. Instead of messing about with hardware, it could just have the iPhone.
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