At the close of business today, Sun Microsystems' stock price took a wallop – down over 12% to $3.61/share. Let’s do some math:

According to the Yahoo Finance, JAVA’s market cap is current $2.67 billion, and as of the close of the last quarter (9/28/2008), they had $2.63 billion in cash. Granted, some of that cash is likely used up now, but JAVA’s stock is now at the point where it’s not valued at all – if Sun were to just close up shop and distribute cash on hand (and not sell anything via liquidation), investors would get their money back. Debt/equity isn’t that bad, so it’s not like they owe so much to creditors the cash wouldn’t make it back to investors.

Still, Sun isn’t exactly the darling of the market. They’ve made a lot of missteps, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see their CEO ousted soon. But the stock is reaching the point of negative valuation – and I’m not sure they’re so bad off that they’ll completely run the company into the ground.