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

(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)

Greg Abel’s annual cash salary for 2026 as the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is $25 million, a 19% increase from the $21 million he got in 2024 as the company’s vice chairman for non-insurance operations. (Abel’s 2025 salary has not yet been publicly disclosed.)

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

After crunching a lot of proxy numbers from MyLogIQ, The Wall Street Journal reports Abel’s salary “would be the highest a chief executive running a current S&P 500 company has earned in any single year between 2010 and 2024.”

The real money for CEOs, however, comes in the form of stocks, stock options, and other noncash awards.

When those are included, Abel still tops 2024’s median of just over $16 million for S&P 500 chief executives.

But the Journal says, “Most of the top 100 best-paid executives received more than $25 million, when stock and other noncash awards are added.”

Glenview Trust’s CIO Bill Stone tells the newspaper that since Abel is leading one of the S&P’s 10 largest companies, “One would expect his compensation to be commensurate with that level of CEOs.”

While not unusual for the CEO of a very large American corporation, Abel’s paycheck is a striking departure from Buffett’s annual salary of $100,000 (plus another $300K or so for personal and home security services provided by Berkshire. He also typically repaid half of his salary to cover personal expenses paid for the company.)

Unlike Abel, however, Buffett was, in effect, the founder of what is now a giant conglomerate, with virtually all of his current net worth of almost $150 billion generated by enormous gains for his Berkshire shares over the decades. (He’s also given away shares now worth $200 billion.)

He could afford a symbolically small salary over the years as the “billionaire next door.” 

According to the 2025 annual meeting proxy, Abel owns Berkshire shares currently valued at around $171 million.

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

At the 2017 annual meeting, Buffett suggested his then-unknown CEO successor might be so rich “they might even wish to perhaps set an example by engaging for…