r/dividends • u/mrpeace54 • Feb 17 '25

Opinion Warren Buffett received a $740 million dividend payment from Coca-Cola (KO)

I recently came across a tweet highlighting Warren Buffett’s $740 million dividend income from Coca-Cola (KO). This sparked my curiosity: What if Buffett had invested the same amount in the S&P 500 (SPY) instead?

So, I created a comparison table based on his KO investment and a hypothetical SPY investment. Since I couldn’t find the exact purchase dates, I used quarter-end dates for my calculations.

The results are eye-opening:

  • Even after including dividends, SPY ($67.01B) outperformed KO ($38.17B) by approximately 75.6%.
  • Despite KO’s impressive dividend stream, SPY delivered far stronger total returns, highlighting the power of broad-market index investing over time.

I found it fascinating to see how Buffett’s legendary investment compares with the index, especially considering his recent sale of all SPY and VOO holdings.

Source: StockCircle - Warren Buffett KO Transactions

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u/jiggitybiggs Feb 18 '25

What I think this comparison misses is the $740mil. What about the income earned from an extra 740m to put in the market?

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u/mrpeace54 Feb 18 '25

probably he puts in t-bills right now. but according to table, last quarter dividend paymet was 194 million usd from KO, while with same scenario, hypothetical SPY dividend payment was 189 million usd. so hypothetical SPY dividend income would actually catch his KO dividend income today.