How the Walmart shareholders meeting went from a few guys in a coffee shop to a 14,000-person, star-studded celebration

Walmart

More than 14,000 people filled the Bud Walton Arena for the 2016 Walmart Shareholders Meeting.

There's nothing that comes close to the Walmart Shareholders Meeting, a 14,000-person celebration of all things Walmart held ahead of every summer.

Sure, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger throw down every year with more than twice as many people at the annual Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, but that event doesn't come close to matching the energy at Walmart's, and Buffett didn't invite pop stars Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton to host this year's meeting, as Walmart did on Friday.

And though the Walmart Shareholders Meeting is always held on a Friday, it is a much bigger party for the employees, who arrive on Tuesday, for four days of events.

But before Walmart was the world's biggest retailer, it was an Arkansas company struggling to earn respect on Wall Street and compete in an industry dominated by Kmart.

When founder Sam Walton held his first shareholders meeting in 1970 (when its stock was trading around $15), he presided over five other people at a coffee shop table. With the help of Walmart's lead historian Alan Dranow and Walton's posthumously published memoir from 1992, "Sam Walton: Made In America," we took a look at how the Walmart Shareholders Meeting went from that to the spectacle it is today.