Abel’s $25 million Berkshire paycheck is in the same league as other S&P 500 CEOs

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As Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO, Greg Abel’s annual cash salary for 2026 is $25 million, up 19% from the previous year. $21 million He started working as the company’s vice president of non-insurance operations in 2024. (Abel’s 2025 salary has not yet been publicly disclosed.)

Berkshire’s apply this week It doesn’t say anything about additional compensation for Abel, but the company has said it would never use its shares to pay employees.

After solving numerous proxy tricks MyLogIQ, Wall StreetJournal reports Abel’s salary “will be the highest salary earned by a chief executive running an existing S&P 500 company in any year between 2010 and 2024.”

But the real money for CEOs is; It comes in the form of stocks, stock options and other non-cash rewards.

When those are included, Abel still sits just above the $16 million 2024 median for S&P 500 CEOs.

But The diary says, “Most of the 100 best-paid executives received more than $25 million when stock and other non-cash awards are added.”

Bill Stone, Glenview Trust’s CIO, told the newspaper that since Abel leads one of S&P’s 10 largest companies, “we can expect his compensation to be in line with the level of CEOs.”

While not unusual for the CEO of a very large American company, Abel’s salary differs dramatically from Buffett’s annual salary of $100,000 (plus an additional $300,000 or so for personal and home security services provided by Berkshire). He also usually paid back half his salary to cover personal expenses paid to the company.

But unlike Abel, Buffett was actually the founder of what is now a giant conglomerate, and nearly all of his current net worth ($150 billion) was derived from the massive gains of Berkshire stock over the decades. (He also distributed shares now worth $200 billion.)

For years he was able to earn a symbolically small salary as the “neighbour’s billionaire.”

according to 2025 annual meeting proxyAbel owns Berkshire shares, currently worth about $171 million.

That’s a “decent amount,” according to investor Jonathan Boyar, butI recently told Yahoo Finance Abel “should personally purchase an extremely large amount of Berkshire stock and really put his money where his mouth is.”

At the 2017 annual meeting, Buffett suggested The then-unknown CEO’s successor might be so rich that “perhaps they might even want to set an example by engaging in something much lower than their actual market value.”

Or, he thought, you could pay “a very modest amount” in cash and, unlike standard CEO option packages, it has a fixed return. strike pricegive them an option to account for annual strike price increases retained earnings“because why would someone keep some earnings and then claim that they actually increased value just because they hid the money from shareholders?”

(You can watch and/or read his full response in “Highlights from CNBC’s Buffett Archive” below.)

Professor Randall Peterson, London Business School Focuses on organizational behavior.

He told me that when founders leave or become less involved with the different companies they created, those companies “start doing more things like other people do.”

Abel’s high salary seems to be a step towards “normalization”. But if Berkshire eventually becomes indistinguishable from its corporate peers, he thinks it will be a very long process and one that probably won’t accelerate until Buffett dies.

Even though Abel was already collecting big paychecks, Buffett told CNBC last may resident of iowa he is not a “distorted individual” and “lives what appears to be a normal life.”

While Professor Peterson cannot predict Abel’s specific future, he notes that there are many examples of people who started out as “normal” but did not stay that way after years of experiencing great wealth.

Buffett’s never-before-seen May interviews with CNBC will be featured in a two-hour special,”Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy,” next Tuesday, January 13, at 7pm ET.

Berkshire Hathaway During Greg Abel’s first week as CEO, shares rose slightly but fell short of the previous week. S&P 500 roughly one percentage point.

Since the beginning of the year, including: Last Friday’s BRK fellThe S&P is ahead by about 2 1/2 percentage points whether the index’s dividends are included or not.

Last year, the S&P with dividends, Buffett’s standard measure, outperformed Berkshire’s A shares by 7.0 percentage points.

More than eight years ago, when it was still unknown who would be Berkshire Hathaway’s next CEO, Warren Buffett shared his thoughts As for how much this person should be paid, given his famous annual salary of $100,000 (plus personal protection services).

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Three years ago, at the meeting, you were asked how you think we should compensate your successor.

You said it was a good question and that you would address it in the next annual letter.

We were waiting patiently. (Laughter)

Can you now tell us how you think, at least philosophically, about how the company should compensate your successor so that we don’t have to worry when paid consultants arrive on the scene?

WARREN BUFFET: Actually there are a few possibilities and I don’t want to go into detail about them.

But you can have, and in fact I hope to have someone who is: A) someone who is already very rich, if they’ve been working for a long time and have that kind of ability, that’s very rich, and they’re not actually motivated by whether they have ten times more money or a hundred times more money than they and their families might need.

They may even want to set an example by going for something much lower than what you can tell their true market value actually is.

This may or may not happen, but I think it would be great if it did. But I can’t blame anyone for wanting market value.

And then I would say that if they didn’t choose to go that direction, you would probably pay them a very modest amount and then have an option that increases in value annually – or increases in strike price – no one does that much. Graham Holdings did it. Washington Post the company has achieved some – but it will increase because it assumes a significant amount of retained earnings each year.

Because why would someone keep some earnings and then claim that they actually increased value just because they hid the money from shareholders?

So it’s very easy to design this, and in private companies people design it this way. They don’t want to do that with public companies because they make more money the other way.

However, they may have a very significant shareholding that can be exercised, but the shares had to be held for several years after retirement so that over time they actually had the result that the majority of the shareholders could choose and take their place as to when they exercised and sold too many shares.

It is not difficult to design. And it really depends on who you’re dealing with, how much they care about money, and whether they have money beyond their ability to use.

Holdings as of September 30, 2025, as reported. Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing On November 14, 2025, except:

A complete list of holdings and current market values ​​is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please send me any questions or comments about the newsletter at: alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (We’re sorry, but we do not forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

Additionally, reading Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders is highly recommended. There are people gathered on Berkshire’s website here.

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch