Coca-Cola

She was beautiful, started working, making $1,000 a night, $800 a night, $1,200 a night.

She quit school, dumped her college boyfriend, and took up with a Coke dealer.

And that girl was the one that caused my buddy Carmen, that owned the first rock club I worked, the first strip club I worked in, to say, I'm never hiring another young girl like that again that's in school.

Because he thought to himself, like, it ruined her.

Sure.

You know, And so it's like – but when you're young, you're like, hey, I'm making so much money.

And then some Coke dealer that's – but it's all a house of cards that will eventually crumble.

Cards don't crumble.

Okay.

I want to tell you first, I remember when I was working for the Coca-Cola company, I worked for Coca-Cola for many years and had a great time working for Coke.

And anyway, one day I was coming home from work at night.

I worked late often and I was coming home on I-75.

Now, I'm looking at that.

I would have thought an old conservative company like Coca-Cola, you know, you usually see those kinds of companies having low leverage.

And here I'm looking at Coke and it's actually fairly, it's not as bad as it was.

It went up quite a bit.

You see here how it was actually almost two-thirds debt.

See, there's your damn time's interest earned.

Okay.

Well, Coke's in good shape.

You were selling Coca-Cola-

I've also-

... door-to-door in Xiamen, China? Door-to-door Coke salesman-

That was my first day, yeah

...

[laughs] Didn't have to pull that rickshaw anymore.

Well, it really-

Tripled his Coke sales with that

And the IRS, which for decades had been losing this kind of case in court, actually won a stunning victory against Coca-Cola about five years ago.

Coca-Cola then has appealed that and meanwhile has actually continued to use the same tax formula that the IRS originally had criticized back in twenty fifteen, and that and interest has made the money at stake really pile up.

So what started as three point three billion dollars covering a three-year period, if the IRS wins on appeal, could now stretch to a total bill covering the whole case for Coke of twenty billion dollars.

Coca-Cola, for its part, argues that it shifted profits appropriately because its subsidiaries in various countries have made valuable marketing investments.

It also says that the IRS had agreed to the formula that it used in nineteen ninety-six, but this will be a matter for judges to decide basically who's right, and it doesn't just have implications for Coke, although I don't think any company would like to pay a total of twenty billion dollars in extra taxes.

But it also has become a symbol of whether or not the IRS can win meaningful cases against America's largest companies.

It sounds like Coke is pretty confident that it will win, though.

Why is that?

FedEx pays out on October first and UNH pays out on September twenty-second.

Altria and Coca-Cola go ex-dividend Tuesday.

Altria pays out on October ninth and Coke pays out on October first.

That's all for today's Wall Street Brunch.

Look for links to stories in the show notes section.