John Paul Austin (February 14, 1915 – December 26, 1985) was Chairman, President and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company.

He served on a PT squadron in the Pacific and was uninjured in the friendly fire incident involving PT-346 in April 1944.

[2] Paul Austin was working at the New York law firm of Larkin, Rathbone & Perry when he joined the legal department at Coca-Cola in 1949.

The groundbreaking "Hilltop" commercial featuring "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" was released in 1971 and has had a long lasting connection with the public.

[5] Paul Austin grew Coca-Cola's export markets dramatically, bringing the soft drink to countries that often did not have amicable relations with the United States.

Through meetings with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Austin helped restore operations in Egypt after a 12-year boycott.

In a January 1979 article in People magazine, Austin stated that to bring Coca-Cola back to mainland China, "[a]ll it took was patience.

Austin's wife Jeane influenced the interior look of the building, decorating it with artwork she found during her husband's business travels.

[10] Paul Austin was an active supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. After King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, plans for an interracial celebration in still-segregated Atlanta were not initially well supported by the city's business elite until Austin intervened.

[11] In his memoir, activist and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young wrote: J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Mayor Ivan Allen summoned key Atlanta business leaders to the Commerce Club's eighteenth floor dining room, where Austin told them flatly, "It is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner.

Governor Jimmy Carter was not well known outside of Georgia when Paul Austin gave him his personal and professional support during the 1976 presidential election.

In his White House diary President Jimmy Carter wrote: I wanted Paul, as a private citizen, to investigate with Castro the prospects of moving more actively towards reconciliation between the U.S. and Cuba.

[16]The Austin-Castro-Carter relationship and its link to sugar pricing was the subject of a July 1977 column by William Safire in The New York Times.

Playing off of Coca-Cola's slogan, Safire wrote, "The Carter-Coke-Castro sugar diplomacy is not merely a potential conflict of interest.

Austin's April 1970 speech to the Georgia Bankers Association entitled "Environmental Renewal or Oblivion – Quo Vadis?

In it Austin, as head of Coca-Cola, accepted responsibility for the corporation's effects on the environment and pledged to offset them with Coca-Cola-sponsored programs.

Whole student populations are engaging in protests and demonstrations against those who compound their transgressions of pollution with an abysmal ignorance of man's responsibility to his environment.

[18]Paul Austin served on a number of other executive boards including SunTrust, General Electric, Dow Jones & Company, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Continental Oil and Federated Department Stores.