The One Stock Beating Apple, Nvidia, And Tesla For 24 Years Running

If you could go back in time to January 1, 2000, and tell your past self to make just one investment, what would it be?

Maybe Apple Inc. AAPL, which has sold 1.5 billion iPhones since 2007 and reported a $21.45 billion profit last quarter?

Or Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA, which went from selling just 937 cars in 2009 to over 1.8 million last year?

Some savvy income investors might consider Altria Group Inc. MO. The tobacco giant, formerly Phillip Morris International Inc., has grown its dividends by over 700% since the early 2000s. In fact, Altria was the most successful stock of the 20^th century, turning every $1 invested into over $6,000.

But that was the 20^th century. Since the year 2000, one little-known company has left these Wall Street darlings in the dust.

How an Energy Drink Company Thrashed Apple's, Tesla's, and Nvidia's Returns

Monster Beverage Corp. MNST is a company no one ever described as changing the world. It's not putting an iPhone into every third human's hand or solving climate change.

Yet this energy drink company returned over 140,000% from 2000 to 2024 so far — enough to turn every $1 invested into $1,400 and change.

Why was Monster Beverage able to dramatically outperform these world-changing companies?

Part of the reason comes from its size. Monster Beverage recorded $92 million in revenue in 2002 while Apple reported $5.7 billion. A smaller company can grow revenue—and ultimately its earnings and share price—much faster than a company that's already a behemoth.

But there's bigger factor at play. Apple spent $446 million on research and development in 2002 to stay ahead of its competitors and maintain its existing operations. By 2022, its annual operating costs had reached $274 billion.

To keep the lights on, Apple had to spend $274 billion, or the company could no longer make and sell products. By contrast, Monster Beverage spent just $4.6 billion on operating costs in 2022.

It turns out that an energy-drink business is a lot less capital-intensive than a tech business—and this difference, compounded over the years, means that Monster Beverage had hundreds of billions of dollars more to plow into growing its business by expanding operations and claiming greater market share.

A similar dynamic benefitted Coca-Cola Co. KO. If you've ever wondered why the ticker symbol is KO rather than CO or CC, it's because Wall Street settled on an acronym for "knock out." The sentiment was that investing in Coca-Cola was a slam dunk because the invaluable brand name commanded loyalty from hundreds of millions around the world. How could investors go wrong?

Sure enough, $100 invested in Coca-Cola at the time of its 1919 initial public offering (IPO) would have turned into $1.25 million a century later. A lot of factors are behind that performance, but it's not a coincidence that Coca-Cola had to pay just $24 billion in operating costs in 2020, or less than 10% of what Apple paid.

So, while tech stocks understandably get most of the mainstream media's attention, investors should never discount the power of companies that can grow earnings each year without massive research and development budgets. As they say on Wall Street, "boring can be beautiful" when it comes to markets—and Monster Beverage proves it.

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