Warren Buffett's best and worst investments

Berkshire Hathaway first invested $1.3 billion in Coca-Cola in 1988 and now owns a 9.3% stake in the $308 billion beverage giant.

This year, Coca-Cola’s stock has performed well, rising about 15% and trading near record highs.

On a personal level, Buffett is known to be a Coke lover, drinking several cans a day.

On Saturday, Buffett was seated with two cans of Coca-Cola during Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting.

“At 94 years of age, I’ve been able to drink whatever I like to drink,” Buffett said at the meeting.

Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway first purchased shares of Apple in 2016. Since then, the stock has soared over 800%.

By the end of 2023, Berkshire’s roughly $35 billion investment in Apple had grown to $173 billion. Buffett praised Apple CEO Tim Cook at Berkshire’s annual meeting on Saturday.

“Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more than I have made Berkshire,” Buffett told the crowd.

Berkshire slashed its position in Apple massively last year, but is still one of the tech giant’s largest investors with a 2% stake.

Buffett first started purchasing shares of GEICO in 1976. In 1996, Berkshire bought the company’s remaining shares to own the insurance giant outright.

“Full employment, boomtime profits and record dividend payments do not set the stage for depressed security prices,” Buffett wrote at the time.

In a 2016 annual letter to shareholders, Buffett said he expects GEICO to pass State Farm for the top spot in auto insurance by his 100th birthday.

“On August 30, 2030 — my 100th birthday — I plan to announce that GEICO has taken over the top spot. Mark your calender,” he said.

That prediction might prove wrong. Data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners shows GEICO was third among auto insurers by market share in 2024, behind Progressive and State Farm.

Buffett first started investing in American Express in the 1960s when the company was embroiled in a scandal that Fortune called “the greatest public-relations event in its history.”

By 1967, the company reached a $60 million settlement and began to heal its reputation.

Now Berkshire owns more than 21% of the company, and despite not adding a single share since 1995, the value of its position has swelled to over $42 billion.

Buffett purchased the candy store chain See’s Candies for $25 million in 1972. By 2011, Berkshire had made $1.65 billion from the candy company.

Buffett cites his 1972 purchase of the company as a turning point in his career because it taught him that it made sense to buy great businesses as long as they retained a competitive advantage.

Buffett is known to be a fan of See’s Candies.

BYD is now the world’s largest EV maker, but the Chinese firm was a relatively under-the-radar company when Buffett invested in it in 2008.

Buffett credited his partner, Charlie Munger, for selling him on the investment.

“Charlie called me one day and says, ‘We’ve got to buy BYD, this guy that runs it is better than Thomas Edison,'” Buffett told CNBC in 2018.

Buffett was so impressed by BYD that he offered to buy 25% of the EV-maker — only to be rejected by founder Wang Chuanfu.

Berkshire eventually acquired a 10% stake in BYD for $232 million in 2008 when its share price was around 8 Hong Kong dollars. By end-2021, the shares were worth $7.7 billion.

Berkshire started trimming its BYD stake in 2022.

Buffett reflected on his greatest errors in a letter to shareholders in 2014, in which he wrote that his “most gruesome mistake” was investing in Dexter Shoe, a Maine-based shoemaker that collapsed soon after.

Buffett acquired Dexter Shoe in 1993 for $433 million, calling it a “business jewel.”

However, by 2001, Berkshire’s shoe business finished $46 million in the red as it was “swamped by losses at Dexter,” Buffett told investors in his annual letter.

In a 2010 interview with CNBC, Buffett said that the dumbest stock he ever bought was, surprisingly, Berkshire Hathaway in 1962. By 1964, Berkshire was a sinking textile company, and managers tried to “chisel” Buffett for more money, he said.

“This made me mad, so I went on and started buying the stock… and I took control of the company,” Buffett said.”That sounds like a great morality tale, but the truth is, I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business.”

Buffett said the “anchor” of textile assets stayed attached to Berkshire as the company moved into the insurance space, and he estimated that Berkshire would be worth twice as much “if we just started out with the insurance company.”

According to CNBC, Berkshire Hathaway owned 415 million shares of Tesco in 2012. In 2014, the company’s shares fell to a 14-year low after it overstated its profits.

In his 2014 annual letter to shareholders, Buffett wrote that the incident cost Berkshire a $444 million after-tax loss.

“An attentive investor, I’m embarrassed to report, would have sold Tesco shares earlier. I made a big mistake with this investment by dawdling,” he wrote.

In a 2017 interview with CNBC, Buffett said that investors sometimes asked him why he didn’t own shares of Amazon.

“I don’t have a good answer,” Buffett said. “Obviously, I should’ve bought it long ago because I admired it long ago, but I didn’t understand the power of the model.”

Buffett went on to say that Amazon is “one I missed big time.”