Warren Buffett: 7 of His Best Investments

As of mid-February, Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A shares were trading at around $607,220 — an all-time high. Shares of Warren Buffett‘s company have risen by 97% in just the past five years.

Between the time he took over as CEO in 1965 and 2022, Buffett added $790 billion in shareholder value, according to Motley Fool, for an aggregate return of 4,355,005% on the company’s Class A shares.

It’s not magic. It’s the result of the kind of wise investments that have made Buffett the most famous and successful investor in history.

Here’s a look at the bets that worked out best for “The Oracle of Omaha,” who filed his first tax return at the age of 13 and is now the sixth richest person in the world.

Buffett’s love affair with Apple is a well-known fact. Although Buffet sold off 10 million shares of Apple stock in the final three months of 2023, it still accounts for 44.8% of the Berkshire portfolio. Apple is Buffett’s biggest holding by a mile.

Apple is currently trading at around $182, down from a peak of $198 at the end of 2023. Despite this dip, Buffett has made a ton of money off this stock. According to The Motley Fool, “while Berkshire’s stake in Apple is worth around $173 billion, Buffett and his team likely spent around $40 billion establishing that position.”

The ratings agency Moody’s accounts for 2.5% of Berkshire’s portfolio, and Buffett has long been on the stock since 2000 when it spun off from Dun & Bradstreet. 

According to Motley Fool, Buffett paid $248 million to acquire 24,669,778 shares at a cost basis of $10.05 per share. Now, Moody’s is trading at around $373 for a gain of about 3,630%.

That, however, doesn’t even account for the profits Berkshire made from selling some of its Moody’s stock over the last two-plus decades, nor does it account for the dividends Moody’s has paid in the previous 23 years. Those two factors add hundreds more percentage points to the tally. 

Coca-Cola is slightly in the red this year. It’s down about 25 cents per share, or 0.44%, since the beginning of 2023.

Berkshire Hathaway owns exactly 400 million shares of Coke — 9.3% of the company and 6.5% of the Berkshire portfolio. The stake cost Buffett $1.3 billion, according to Market Insider, and Berkshire hasn’t touched its shares in the ensuing decades. Berkshires’ shares are now worth nearly $24 billion for a 19-fold gain of 1,800%.

Coke pays Berkshire $736 million in dividend income per year — up from $88 million in 1995.

Chevron shares are up 3.5% for the year to date. No surprise, Buffett has bet big on energy. At the end of 2021, Berkshire owned $4.5 billion worth of Chevron, but now, that number has grown to $19.5 billion, according to CNBC.

Although the bet proves Buffett’s faith in the oil industry’s continued strength, it also reflects his long-standing belief in the value of dividend stocks. According to Motley Fool, Berkshire will collect more than $6 billion in dividend income in the next 12 months — and roughly $666 million of that will be from Chevron.

Buffett’s No. 3 top dividend stock is also an oil giant. Buffett bet big on Occidental — it owns over 248 million shares, a stake that represents 4% of Berkshire’s holdings.

Although shares are down 4.7% over the past year, Buffett’s holdings are still a big win as far as dividends are concerned. The company will pay Berkshire $854,675,379 in dividend income in the next 12 months, according to Motley Fool.

Multinational food giant Kraft Heinz represents 3.1% of the Berkshire portfolio. While it’s not one of Buffett’s flashiest stocks, it shows the mastery that Buffett continues to display when it comes to playing defense. 

As a consumer staples stock, Kraft Heinz doesn’t sway too much with the market winds because it sells everyday things that people need and finds a way to buy no matter the state of the economy.

The company that might just be Buffett’s best investment of all isn’t one that you can buy shares of on the stock market — that’s because it’s one of the dozens of companies that Berkshire Hathaway owns outright.

It wasn’t always that way, though.

Starting in 1976, Buffett began buying up stock in GEICO, a run that continued until 1996. By that time, he owned about half the company. That same year, he purchased the remaining 49%. Berkshire spent two decades and $2.35 billion gobbling up GEICO.

Today, the company is the crown jewel of Berkshire’s cluster of insurers, which represents the heart of the company. In a letter to his shareholders, Buffett called the insurance cluster the biggest of Berkshire’s “four giants.”

Today, GEICO’s assets are worth more than $32 billion.

Note: All holdings are as of Dec. 31, 2023, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on Feb. 14, 2024.

Gabrielle Olya contributed to the reporting for this article.