Need? No. But they can invest cash on hand into things that have a higher yield than the base interest rate, and operate the business using loans at the base interest rate.

Yes. It's actually uncommon for a business not to take loans out. You can see how much a public company owes in the balance sheet: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/balance-sheet/

Cashflow is hard ... On the one hand you must pay 200,000+ employees everywhere in the world at regular intervals without fail. But on the other hand, the cash to do that is tied up in various places, it's in a different country, it's in various interest-bearing bonds or shares that cannot be redeemed quickly, or it's even in future revenues that you've not received yet. And it wouldn't be efficient to have a massive cash float on hand in country-specific bank accounts, when that money could be invested profitably.

Must feel nice to be so valued.

Sure; every company effectively does, by way of the "cost of capital:" https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/cost-of-capital#:~:text=Wha....

But regardless of whether any big tech co. needs loans or not, the cost of any investment they make, as well as the referred-to-present value of any payoff from it, are anchored to the interest rate. And the recent upward movement in the interest rate -- not to mention high inflation -- has drastically (relative to the ~0% interest days) raised the costs and lowered the payoffs.

Tech (both Big Tech & startups) is also getting hammered hardest first here mostly because those are the ventures that attracted investment of the lion's share of 0%-minted dollars, and that investment is vaporizing at the same time that the ROI (payoffs - costs) on lots of those firms' WIP has gone negative.

Every price includes an interest rate derivative, even if you pay with cash.

If interest rates are high, then buying something has a higher opportunity cost since you're forgoing earning interest on your capital. As patio11 put it in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/banking-in-very-uncer..., "when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall."

Good read, thanks

Even Apple with its giant cash war chest uses loans. A lot of their money is in offshore subsidiaries and would incur a tax if they on-shored it to the United States. It’s often cheaper to borrow money and pay it off with earnings than to pay taxes on the money.