Coca-Cola has $45 billion in debt, much of it borrowed at rates between 0.12% and 0.9%. Mark Moss asks why a profitable company would take on so much debt, then shows how the company's earnings barely budge while its total debt keeps climbing.
They have $45 billion in total debt. So the question that a lot of people have when they think about using debt is like, look at that wealthy person, they have so much money, why would they take a loan? Why would they go into debt to buy this thing? Why would a company profitable like this be using so much debt? Well, if we dig into this, we can see some very interesting things. So here's the 2025 annual 10-K, and this shows they have to register all the debt that they take on. And so what we can see is all the different tranches of debt that they've done. Okay, and what's interesting is we can see these notes like 0.75% or 0.12% or 0.12%, 0.4%, 0.5%, 0.9%, 0.8%. They're taking on lots of basically free money, right? Below or not even 1%, below 1%, 0.4%, below half of A percent, right? So crazy amounts of debt that they're taking on, essentially all for free. And so we can see the result of that. Take a look at this. This is a chart that shows Coca-Cola's net income has gone up slowly, a little bit, marginally, a little bit. But look at their total debt going up.
