QuestionerI always see a number of proxy statements each year. In all except Berkshire, the summary compensation table has the compensation listed for at least five or more of the highest paid executives. Berkshire lists three, Warren, Charlie, and Mark. Would you, in the spirit of transparency, be willing to add at least two of the highest paid subsidiary officers in the table in future years?
WarrenWe obviously are following the SEC rules, which I can't recite in terms of the officers, required to be in the proxy statement as to their pay. But, you know, Andrew, in my sporting mood I would say that Comcast probably has some people in the employee that make a lot more money. I'm not at CNBC, we're not, but that would exceed the salaries of the people that they list in the proxy statement as well. And there's a real question. There's a real question as to whether it's in the interests of the shareholders of the company to start listing, you know, how much the person who's the anchor, the nightly news, or whomever it might be, gets paid because it might have a very negative effect in terms of negotiating salaries with other people within the organization. I would say that the shareholders of Comcast would be hurt. actually, if you published the five highest salaries, paid at the subsidiaries, or at Comcast itself, and certainly if you carried it to every subsidiary there was, I mean, if you were to publish the five highest salaries at CNBC, I don't think the salaries overall would go down in the following years. So I think that is a, I think that's a good reason for not, for us not publishing the salaries of, you know, say our top 10 managers of the company. We, at Solomon, we mentioned that a little early, everybody, virtually everybody was dissatisfied with what they were getting paid, and they were getting paid enormous amounts of money, but they were, they were disappointed, not because of the absolute amount, they were disappointed, because they looked at somebody else in the place, and it drove them crazy. I think it's been, I think it's very seldom that publishing compensation accomplishes much for the shareholders. In fact, you can argue that much of what's going on in corporate America, well, I would put it this way. Corporate CEOs as a group would be being paid a lot less money if proxy statements hadn't revealed how much other people were getting paid. It is only human to look at a whole bunch of proxy statements and say, well, I'm worth more than that guy and negotiate that way, and a comp committee is going to respond to that. So American shareholders are paying a significant price for the fact that they get to look at that proxy statement every year and see how much those top five officers are earning. There's no CEO that looks at other proxy statements and comes away thinking I should get paid less. I mean, that, you know.