- Warren Buffett's Annual Stock Gift to Gates Foundation Worth $1.8B This Year
- Florida Politicians Hold Their Noses and Pay Buffett's Berkshire $224 Million for Hurricane Pledge
- Warren Buffett's Advice to Young People Seeking Financial Independence
- Buffett's Berkshire Feels the Bear's Bite
- China Fund Manager to Pay Record $2.1 Million for Lunch with Warren Buffett
- Warren Buffett Charity Lunch Auction Ends with High Bid of $2,110,100
- Bidding Tops $300K for Warren Buffett Charity Lunch as Deadline Nears
- Warren Buffett's Incredibly Ordinary Visit to a "Drab" Industrial Neighborhood
- Lunch With Warren Buffett "Worth Every Penny" at $650,100
- TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett's Power Lunch Interview on "Exploding" Inflation
- The Week: Pickers Focus on Steel, Financials, Tech & International Stocks
- Bowyer: Back to Monarchy in Land Rights?
- Parking Cash in European Telecoms
- Bargain Stocks: Nokia, Spectra, Incitex Pivot
- Sticker Shock: Fast Money's Inflation Special
- Our Favorite Inflation Trades
- Warren Buffett's Annual Stock Gift to Gates Foundation Worth $1.8B This Year
- That '70's Trade
- The Villain Of Our Story
- Geopolitical Concerns Keep Oil Supported near $144
- South Korea Won Jumps on Intervention Warning
- Asian Markets Are Mixed, Shanghai Leads
- Will Smith Tops Box Office with 'Hancock'
- NBC Universal to Buy The Weather Channel
- Merrill Will Decide on BlackRock Stake Sale Soon
- For Stocks, Escaping Bear Hinges on Oil, GE
- Bush Backs Strong Dollar Policy
- Merrill May Be Close to Selling Bloomberg Stake: Report

Warren Buffett's performance vs. pay ratio, already enormous by Corporate America's standards, got even more impressive in 2007.
In a SEC filing ahead of Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting in early May, the company lists an annual salary of $100,000 for its Chairman and CEO. That's unchanged from last year, and according to the filing, "Mr. Buffett’s annual compensation has been $100,000 for over the last 25 years and he has advised the Committee that he would not expect or desire it to increase in the future." (Berkshire's Chief Financial Officer Marc Hamburg gets a much bigger salary than his boss at $712,500 in 2007, up a bit from $662,500 the year before.)
In 2007, Berkshire shares had their best year since 1998, gaining 28.7 percent, while the S&P advanced by 3.5 percent.
By my (admittedly simplistic) calculation, expressing salary in millions of dollars as is the custom for most big-time chief executives, that makes his 2007 performance/pay ratio:
(28.7-3.5)/0.1 = 252
That's up from 105 in 2006, and far exceeds a 'shocking' -22 in 2005, the most recent year in which Berkshire didn't beat the S&P.
As the AP notes in its story about the Berkshire filing, it's easier to figure out exactly how much Buffett is paid compared to most of his fellow CEOs because, in contrast to the normal C-suite custom, he doesn't get any bonuses, stock options, executive perks, deferred compensation, or other fancy compensation complicaters.
Of course, it's clear that the world's richest person isn't living off that $100k salary alone, (or probably at all), and it isn't what brings him into the office each morning.
Instead, he's working to increase the long-term value of Berkshire stock, making both his shareholders, and himself, very wealthy over the years.
Current Berkshire price: [US;BRK.A
Loading...
()
]
Questions? Comments? Email me at
Recent Warren Buffett Watch Posts |




