ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into the different types of intellectual rents garnered by Apple, the corporation with the highest market capitalization during most of the last decade. Beneath Apple’s success, there is a twofold process: rentiership (including predation) and extraordinary profits due to its relatively higher intangible capital intensity. We focus on the former and disentangle how Apple collects intellectual and financial rents. We argue that Apple’s intellectual rents are collected from its exclusive know-who can do what and know-how to plan and organize global value chains and innovation networks. Moreover, this intellectual monopoly garners intellectual rents from its patents and trademarks but also from knowledge kept in secret. Simultaneously, Apple exclusively collects rents from its research activity with leading research universities and start-ups, thus predating knowledge from them. Finally, Apple is also enjoying data-driven intellectual rents even if, as the chapter explains, the Cupertino giant lags behind the other US tech giants in this respect. The chapter finishes with a preliminary analysis of the complementarities between intellectual and financial rentiership.
