“The way to get big shots to change their behavior is to embarrass them.”

So said Warren Buffett, a.k.a. the World’s Greatest Investor, in 2009 on the subject of excessive executive compensation. He was speaking at the annual meeting of his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, a forum that he has often used to criticize executive compensation practices. In that 2009 meeting, though, he also made a suggestion about how to begin to change such practices. Institutional investors, he said, should start to “speak out on the most egregious cases.”

Apparently, though, Buffett doesn’t believe in the adage that you should practice what you preach. At least not based on what we saw this week. Given a chance to embarrass some major big shots — namely his fellow board members at Coca-Cola, a company where he is the largest shareholder, and whose equity compensation plan he felt was unjustifiably rich — he chose instead to punt. His reasons for doing so illustrate exactly why it is impossible to rein in excessive compensation.

The controversy over Coke’s equity compensation began about a month ago when one of the company’s investors, David Winters of Wintergreen Advisers, wrote a letter to the Coca-Cola directors complaining that the plan was excessive. “The Company expects that the 2014 Plan will award a mix of 60% options, 40% full value shares, resulting in the issuance of 340,000,000 Coca-Cola shares,” he wrote. Winters estimated that this would result in a transfer from shareholders to management of around $13 billion — and combined with previous equity awards, “this figure rises to $24 billion.” He called it an “outrageous grab.”

The equity compensation plan had to be approved by shareholders, so Winters began a campaign to get big institutional shareholders to vote it down at the annual meeting. In the weeks preceding the meeting, he ratcheted up his attack on the plan, complaining, among other things, that the performance targets that had to be met to get the equity awards were adjustable. (“In football terms, this allows the Compensation Committee to move the goal posts closer once the ball is in the air.”) Coke, of course, disputed Winters’s assessment and urged shareholders to vote for the plan.