Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett said he has seen a burgeoning trend of snowballing CEO pay as executives eyeball each other’s ever-growing compensation deals.
In his annual shareholder letter—the last one he will pen as CEO before Berkshire vice chair Greg Abel takes over on Jan. 1—Buffett suggested chief executives are driven by greed and selfishness to drive up their own pay after seeing competitors ratchet up their own remunerations.
“What often bothers very wealthy CEOs—they are human, after all—is that other CEOs are getting even richer,” he said. “Envy and greed walk hand in hand. And what consultant ever recommended a serious cut in CEO compensation or board payments?”
Buffett’s remarks come on the heels of Tesla investors approving CEO Elon Musk’s record-breaking $1 trillion pay package on Thursday. The compensation package, contingent on the EV company reaching an $8.5 trillion market capitalization, would make the already-world’s-richest-man into the first trillionaire. Musk’s net worth is currently about $449 billion.
The next day, EV competitor Rivian announced a $4.6 billion compensation package for CEO RJ Scaringe over the next decade, modeled after Musk’s plan. The package, which would double Scaringe’s base salary of $2 billion, is also dependent on the automaker reaching certain operating income and cash flow targets over the next seven years.
Tesla and Rivian did not immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Buffett, reflecting on 60 years of leading his multi-industry conglomerate, said in his letter that companies’ disclosures of CEO pay was in part an effort to make executives at least a little self-conscious about the amount of money they were earning. However, what was intended as a gesture to humble instead became a contest of superiority.
“During my lifetime, reformers sought to embarrass CEOs by requiring the disclosure of the compensation of the boss compared to what was being paid to the average employee,” Buffett said. “Proxy statements promptly ballooned to 100-plus pages compared to 20 or less earlier. But the good intentions didn’t work; instead they backfired.”
“Based on the majority of my observations—the CEO of company ‘A’ looked at his competitor at company ‘B’ and subtly conveyed to his board that he should be worth more. Of course, he also boosted the pay of directors and was careful who he placed on the compensation committee,” he added. “The new rules produced envy, not moderation.”
Indeed, compensation packages have swelled extravagantly, climbing 34.7% among the U.S.’s 100 largest low-wage employers from 2019 to 2024, according to an August report from the Institute for Policy Studies. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio similarly ballooned, growing from 560:1 in 2019 to 632:1 last year. Inordinate pay packages have helped make the country’s wealthiest billionaires $698 billion richer this year, per an Oxfam report published this month. Buffett, in contrast, has an annual salary of $100,000 (though his net worth sits at around $150 billion thanks to his investments, making him the 11th richest person on earth).
Other financial giants have spoken out against exorbitant pay packages, Musk’s in particular. Norges Investment Management, the entity behind Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund and a 1.14% stakeholder in Tesla, voted against Musk’s compensation plan.
“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role,” the group said in a statement last week, “we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk—consistent with our views on executive compensation.”
