Buffett and Munger spent about $1.3 billion buying Coca-Cola shares. Today, they receive more than $800 million a year in dividends alone—enough to recoup their original investment roughly every year and a half.

As of 2025, Berkshire still held about 400 million shares of Coca-Cola, worth more than $25 billion.

Munger once explained the thinking behind the investment:

“Sometimes even great companies like Coca-Cola can be seriously undervalued by the market.”

At the time, Coca-Cola’s business was doing exceptionally well, but its share price was far below its future value. So they bought aggressively for several months, at one point purchasing about a third of the shares traded each day.

Their method for judging whether a stock was cheap was also simple: multiply the share price by the total number of shares to calculate the company’s market value, then ask themselves whether they would be willing to buy the entire company at that price.

Munger summed up his investment principles this way: invest only in businesses you understand; look for companies with durable competitive advantages; and, no matter how excellent a company is, always insist on a margin of safety in the price.
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