Apple’s balance sheet and market value around early 2023 support Jason’s core claim that it was financially feasible for Apple to attempt a takeover of Tesla and that acquiring a large legacy automaker like BMW or Volvo would be far easier.

• Apple’s financial capacity (early 2023): As of December 31, 2022, Apple reported about $20.5B in cash and cash equivalents plus ~$145B in current and non‑current marketable securities, i.e., roughly $165B of cash + liquid securities on hand.(sec.gov) Apple’s equity market cap in January 2023 was around $2.0–2.3T.(statmuse.com) This combination gives Apple enormous capacity to finance very large deals using a mix of existing cash, new debt, and/or stock.
• Tesla’s “depressed” valuation: Tesla’s market cap on January 6, 2023 was about $392B, down sharply from its 2021 peak and roughly matching its end‑2022 market cap of about $389B.(statmuse.com) Apple could not literally “almost buy it with cash” using only its then cash+securities (~$165B vs. a ~$390B target, plus any takeover premium), so that specific phrase is an exaggeration. But given Apple’s trillion‑dollar equity base and very strong credit, a mostly‑cash or cash‑heavy bid financed with some combination of balance‑sheet cash and new debt is financially plausible at that size.
• BMW and Volvo are much smaller: BMW’s total market cap at the end of 2022 was roughly €54–55B (≈$60B).(companiesmarketcap.com) Volvo Cars’ market cap at the end of 2022 was about SEK 141B, which corresponds to roughly $13–14B.(stockanalysis.com) Both are well within the scale of Apple’s 2022 cash + securities alone and trivial relative to its ~$2T market cap, making it accurate to say Apple could have easily financed an acquisition of BMW or Volvo in purely financial terms.
• No such deals occurred (but that wasn’t the claim being graded): Apple’s actual M&A activity through 2025 remains focused on smaller tech and AI‑related companies—there is no Apple acquisition of Tesla, BMW, or Volvo on its acquisitions list.(en.wikipedia.org) However, Jason’s normalized prediction, as you framed it, is about feasibility, not that such a takeover would in fact occur.

Overall, the numbers show that Apple was more than capable of financing a bid for BMW or Volvo outright and had the financial firepower to mount a serious, largely cash‑funded run at Tesla at its early‑2023 valuation. The narrow “almost buy it with cash” line is overstated, but the normalized claim that such moves were financially feasible is substantively correct, so this prediction is best classified as right.