In the summers of 2007 and 2008—when talking about oil at $150 per barrel was a real thing—Warren Buffett sunk $7 billion from Berkshire’s Omaha Treasury into Houston’s Conoco Phillips, the third largest American integrated oil company at the time. It was, at the time, the largest amount of money that Warren Buffett had sunk into a publicly traded business. Those large $10+ billion stakes in American Express and Coca-Cola are largely the result of capital appreciation, with Buffett only sinking $1.28 billion into American Express and $1.29 billion into Coca-Cola, respectively. Buffett’s commitment to Wells Fargo ($11.8 billion of Berkshire’s money invested) and to IBM (at least $11.6 billion and counting of Berkshire’s money invested) have been larger investments in recent times, and full-business acquisitions like Heinz and Gen Re also consumed more of Berkshire’s cash than the Conoco investment.
Buffett bought his Conoco stock at a price of … Read the rest of this article!