Warren Buffett’s last day running Berkshire Hathaway was December 31, 2025 (1). Sixty years. One company. And a track record so absurd it almost doesn’t sound real.
Since Buffett took control in 1965, Berkshire shares have returned more than 6,000,000% (2). Read that number again. The S&P 500 — which most professional fund managers can’t even keep up with — returned 46,061% over that same stretch, including dividends. Buffett beat it by a factor of 130.
His net worth today is around $145–150 billion, putting him in the top ten on the planet (3). And yet — and this is the part that matters if you’re not already a billionaire — 99% of that wealth showed up after he turned 56. He was a millionaire by his early 30s. He didn’t become a billionaire until 1986, at 56, when his net worth finally cracked $1.4 billion.
The whole thing started with $9,800 he’d saved by age 19 — from paper routes, hawking Coca-Cola bottles door-to-door and running a pinball machine racket as a teenager (4).
So what did he actually do with it? His biggest wins weren’t lucky breaks. They were slow, stubborn bets on businesses he understood — held through every crash and panic for decades. Five of them stand out, starting with the deal that changed how Buffett thought about investing forever.
Purchase price: $25 million | Cumulative pre-tax earnings: $2+ billion | Return: 8,000%+ | Held since: 1972 (5)
Before See’s, Buffett was a bargain hunter in the purest sense — what he called “cigar butt” investing. Find a dying company trading below its liquidation value, buy it, squeeze out one last puff of profit, move on. Ugly, but the math worked.
Charlie Munger thought this was insane. Or at least severely limiting.
Munger convinced him to pay $25 million for See’s Candies, a beloved California chocolate company. By the valuation methods Buffett had learned from Benjamin Graham, this was overpaying — See’s wasn’t cheap relative to book value. Buffett nearly killed the deal over the last $25,000. Munger told him he was “slipping back into the stone age” (6).
Buffett bought it. And See’s broke his brain in the best way.
The company had something none of his cigar butts ever did: pricing power. People loved See’s. They’d pay more for it year after year without complaint. And the business threw off enormous amounts of cash — cash Buffett could redeploy into bigger and bigger opportunities. Coca-Cola, eventually, was bought with See’s money.
“We put $25 million into it and it’s given us over $2 billion of pretax income,” Buffett said. “And we’ve used it to buy other businesses.”
What it teaches you: Cheap isn’t the same as good. A mediocre business at a discount will eventually perform like a mediocre business. A great business at a fair price — one with a brand people love and the power to raise prices — will compound for decades.
“The blueprint [Charlie Munger] gave me was simple,” Buffett wrote. “Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.”
Initial investment: $5 billion | Paper profit on warrant exercise: ~$12 billion instantly | Peak value: $36+ billion (in 2022) (7)
August 2011. Bank of America had lost half its market value that year. The mortgage crisis lawsuits were piling up. Investors were running.
Buffett called CEO Brian Moynihan and made him an offer (8). Not a stock purchase — a deal. Classic Buffett: $5 billion in preferred shares paying 6% a year ($300 million in guaranteed annual income), plus warrants to buy 700 million shares of common stock at $7.14 apiece. The stock was trading way above that (9).
So Buffett collected $300 million a year just for showing up. And if Bank of America recovered? He had the right to buy 700 million shares at a massive discount to whatever the stock was trading at.
Bank of America recovered. In 2017, when the stock hit $24 and the bank hiked its dividend, Buffett exercised the warrants and swapped his preferred shares for common stock. The instant paper profit: $12 billion.
Berkshire became the bank’s biggest shareholder and held that position for years before starting to sell down in 2024 and 2025.
What it teaches you: When you have capital and everyone else is desperate, you don’t just get to invest — you get to write the terms. Most of us can’t negotiate like Buffett did, but the principle still holds: dry powder during a crisis is worth more than almost anything.
“The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble,” Buffett has said. “We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.”
Cost basis: $1.3 billion | Current value: ~$31 billion | Gain: ~2,300% (and that’s before dividends) | Held since: 1988 (10)
Buffett had been watching Coca-Cola’s business for more than 50 years before he got around to buying the stock (11). He’d been selling Coke bottles door-to-door as a kid, and later became a devoted Cherry Coke drinker — reportedly putting away five cans a day and once telling an interviewer that a quarter of his daily 2,700 calories comes from Coke. So no one can accuse him of not doing product research.
When he finally bought in 1988, Wall Street thought he’d overpaid. Coca-Cola wasn’t cheap on any standard metric. But Buffett wasn’t looking at the next quarter. He was looking at the next 30 years — a brand with worldwide reach, pricing power that never seemed to quit and a business that basically printed cash.
“We expect to hold these securities for a long time,” he wrote that year. “In fact, when we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever” (12).
About those dividends: in 1994, Berkshire got $75 million from Coca-Cola. By 2023, the annual check had grown past $700 million (13). In 2025, Berkshire collected $816 million — and after Coca-Cola’s latest dividend raise in February 2026, that annual payout is now on pace to hit $848 million (14). On a $1.3 billion original investment, Buffett’s effective dividend yield on Coca-Cola is now roughly 65% per year.
He hasn’t touched the position — not a single share bought or sold — in about three decades. He just deposits the checks.
“Growth occurred every year, just as certain as birthdays,” Buffett wrote. “All Charlie and I were required to do was cash Coke’s quarterly dividend checks.” That’s the takeaway: the unsexy math of compounding is, over enough time, the closest thing to a cheat code in investing. You don’t need exciting. You need reliable — and the patience to sit still.
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Cost basis: ~$1.3 billion | Current value: ~$46–56 billion (depending on share price) | Gain: ~3,500–4,200% | Held since: 1960s (15)
This one goes back to 1963 and a swindle involving — of all things — salad oil.
A con artist named Tino DeAngelis had been faking warehouse receipts for millions of gallons of soybean oil that didn’t actually exist. An American Express subsidiary had backed those receipts, and when the fraud unraveled, the company was staring down $135 million in claims against $78 million in equity. The stock cratered. Wall Street wrote the obituary.
Warren Buffett, 35 years old at the time, didn’t panic. Instead he walked into an Omaha steakhouse and watched the dinner crowd. Were people still pulling out their American Express cards? They were.
His read: the scandal would pass, but the brand wouldn’t. He bought 5% of the company for about $13 million — a stake that roughly doubled or tripled in value before he sold a few years later. It was a great trade, but Buffett later said he regretted selling early.
Decades later, he built his main position in the early ’90s for roughly $1.3 billion and hasn’t added a share since 1995. That stake has compounded to somewhere between $46 and $56 billion depending on where AXP trades on any given day (16). Berkshire owns about 22% of the whole company.
What it teaches you: Panic creates opportunity. Not always — sometimes the panic is justified — but when a great business gets hit by a temporary problem, the crowd tends to overreact. Buffett’s edge was doing simple, on-the-ground research while everyone else was selling.
“Be fearful when others are greedy,” he once wrote, “and greedy when others are fearful.”
Cost basis: ~$36 billion | Total gain (realized + unrealized): $120+ billion | Held since: 2016 (17)
Buffett spent most of his career refusing to touch tech stocks. Didn’t understand them, he said. Wouldn’t pretend he did.
Then at 85 — an age when most people are, respectfully, not making career-defining bets — he plowed roughly $36 billion into Apple (18). Between 2016 and 2018, Berkshire scooped up nearly a billion shares at an average split-adjusted price of $39.62. By late 2023, the stake was worth north of $174 billion.
The thing is, Buffett never really thought of Apple as a tech company. To him it was a consumer brand — one with maybe the most locked-in customer base in the world.
“We own Coca-Cola, which is a wonderful business,” he told the crowd at the 2024 shareholder meeting. “And we own Apple, which is an even better business.”
He also joked — though it was only half a joke — that Tim Cook “has made Berkshire Hathaway a lot more money than I ever have” (19).
What it teaches you: You don’t have to be early. You have to be right. Buffett didn’t buy Apple in 2007 when the iPhone launched. He waited nine years, until he could see the business clearly — not the gadget, but the ecosystem. He bought what he understood when he understood it.
Berkshire has since sold about 75% of its Apple shares, mostly for tax reasons and to resize an enormous position. It’s still the largest holding in the portfolio at roughly 23% (20).
That sell-down is part of a broader pattern. But zoom out far enough and the real story isn’t any single trade — it’s time.
The first $1 million took Buffett 19 years. He didn’t crack a billion until age 56. The next $149 billion stacked up in the decades after — almost all of it in the last 20 years. That’s compounding. It’s boring, then it’s boring, then suddenly it’s $150 billion.
You and I aren’t going to match a 6,000,000% return. That’s fine. You don’t need to (though it would be nice, huh?).
What Buffett’s five biggest wins have in common is simpler than it looks: he bought businesses he understood, held them through ugly stretches, let dividends pile up and moved aggressively when everyone else was panicking. That’s it. No leverage, no day-trading, no crypto side bets.
And here’s the final detail that ties it all together: Buffett left Greg Abel a record $334 billion in cash and Treasuries at the end of 2024 — a war chest that swelled past $380 billion by the time he handed over the keys.
“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
Keep money flowing into quality assets. Don’t sell when things get scary. Give it 20, 30, 40 years. You’ll end up wealthier than most people who spent that same time chasing whatever was hot.
Boring wins. Almost every time.
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Writer’s note: I do not currently hold positions in any of these companies. This article was written for entertainment purposes and is not intended as investment advice.
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
CNBC (1, 6, 7, 17); Berkshire Hathaway (2, 10, 12, 13); Forbes (3); TheStreet (4); Fortune (5, 15); American Banker (8); CNN Money (9); Kiplinger (11); Coca-Cola Investor Relations (14); GuruFocus (16, 18); Nasdaq (19); SEC EDGAR (20)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.