Sometimes rumors are so crazy that they just might be true.

Vague but pointed remarks by Steve Jobs during his surprise appearance on the Apple conference call has led to some speculation that Apple may be considering buying - of all things - Facebook. Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal's All Things D blog points out that Apple has a whopping $51 billion in the bank and that they could afford to buy the social networking giant when it goes public.

When asked yesterday on the earnings call why Apple shouldn't return some of its huge pile of cash to shareholders in the form of dividends, Jobs replied as follows:

Kafka has no inside information suggesting that the "strategic opportunities" include buying Facebook, but he lists the benefits of the acquisition to Apple. First and foremost, Apple can afford it. Facebook is still privately held by Mark Zuckerberg and associates, and has grown from a Harvard-only version of Hot or Not in 2003 to become a company that will have an estimated market value of $35 to $40 billion US when they go public, supposedly next year. Apple could easily cover that and still have money left over to buy a record label or TV studio or two. Secondly, there is the matter of Facebook's enormous user base: half a billion people, or one out of every fourteen humans on the planet Earth, has a Facebook page. Each one of these would presumably gain iTunes and FaceTime accounts, giving Apple unquestioned dominance in online music and video chat. Apple and Facebook aren't currently competing in any realm, but both are competing with Google, and it's probably worth a very large sum of money to Steve Jobs to be able to jab a stick in Eric Schmidt's eye.

Additionally, there's significant synergy. The Facebook app for iPhone has been estimated to be one of the most used apps on the iPhone, with over 100 million active monthly users. David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, claims that he has heard from "someone who thought he knew the data that more than half of all usage of the iPhone of apps, other than those provided by the phone itself like telephony and email, is coming from Facebook."

It's pure speculation, again, so it's wise to not put a whole lot of stock in these rumors. On the other hand, there was word last week that Steve Jobs had Mark Zuckerberg over for dinner. There have been no reports on what they discussed at the supposed meeting, but many speculated that it had to do with Facebook-Ping integration. It would be very interesting if the "integration" they were talking about was at a very different level.

Source: TUAW