Warren Buffett Quotes

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Well-managed companies with independent boards have nothing to fear from activist shareholders.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

I don't like what's going on with the executive compensation.

Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. I make 50 cents for showing up, he liked to joke, and the other 50 cents is based on performance.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots.

I think we have to take a look at corporate law. We have to take a look at the incentives that we can perhaps use to encourage more longer term.

I'm in a different position than most CEO's. I'm a founder. I'm not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO's are hired by the board.

There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.

Corporate governance should be done more through principles than rules.

Life at a public company ain't for me. The board pays you what you're worth, then you get reamed for your compensation.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

We have new rules that give shareholders the ability to vote on executive compensation. We have new rules for asset-backed securities. We have new rules around credit rating agencies.

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

My obligation is to the owners of Barclays, my shareholders. They hired me. People who criticise compensation for individuals in isolation at, say, BarCap, individuals who don't work in the U.K. and are competing with U.S., German or Asian banks, they should look at all these factors.

Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars.

Look, I've always said from the word go many years ago that I felt the whole bonus culture, they need to think very carefully about being detached from the rest of the British public.

TARP is funded by taxpayers, so there are many rules about how that money can and can't be used. The result: GM spends an awful lot of time checking in with the people who administer TARP over everything from hiring to executive compensation and management. For a global company, that adds up to a lot of distraction.

There is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business.

This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives.

CEO compensation seems at time excessive but it should be up to the shareholders and boards of directors.