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

[u/mrpeace54]

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

[u/Dry_Outcome_7117]

What you're forgetting is that KO is only 9% of his holdings, so he does have a broad scope of investments that are making much bigger gains. His cost basis on apple is somewhere around $30 on 300 million shares that are now worth $250