All those rumors swirling around the possibility of an iPad 3 release next month seem to be doing good things for Apple’s stock market activity because the company’s shares reached yet another all-time high this afternoon. Earlier today, shares of Apple peaked at $496.75 and as of writing this continue to hover around the $493 mark.

While it’s hardly surprising anymore to hear about how much money Apple has (hint: it’s more than the GDP of most countries), one fact puts it into perspective: Apple’s worth more than Google and Microsoft combined.

I am an ignoramus when it comes to the stock market, but I can at least add this much.

Apple’s market capitalization: $459.66 billion.
Google’s market capitalization: $199.03 billion.
Microsoft’s market capitalization: $256.10 billion.

Granted, Apple is “only” worth $4.53 billion more than the combined financial worth of Google and Microsoft, but that’s still enough money for them to get into the interplanetary real estate market. But let’s arbitrarily compare Apple’s value to lots of other things that are worth a lot of money:

Budget of NASA: $17.8 million
GDP of Romania: $161.62 billion
GDP of South Africa: $275.5 billion
Total military budget of U.S.: $683.7 billion

Actually, that’s all of the expensive stuff I can think of. At any rate, you get the picture. Apple is ridiculously wealthy.