According to Mr Buffett himself, quite easily it seems. In this year's letter to Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders he readily admits that his investment performance was outshone by his two protégés, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler. Both investment managers beat the S&P by double-digit margins, unlike Mr Buffett whose fund was beaten by the wider market. "Todd and Ted are young and will be around to manage Berkshire's massive portfolio long after Charlie and I have left the scene," he says. "You can rest easy when they take over."
Todd and Ted are not the only managers Mr Buffett gives credit to in his letter, which is noteworthy because I've rarely seen similar attention paid to the guys at the coalface that keep UK plc ticking over. It seems that when a company does well the only people that deserve credit are the clever chaps on the board.
Could this have something to do with the enormous disparity between the pay of those at the top and the rest of the employees, not just in absolute terms, but also in terms of the rate of their pay growth, too? According to a report published this week by Incomes Data Services, the chairmen of the UK's largest companies saw their pay increase 6 per cent last year - three times more than the average UK wage. Non-execs have seen their salaries double over the past 12 years to £64,302 - more than twice the average UK wage for a whole year of graft, and not the dozen or so meetings a non-exec attends each year.
Excessive board pay is something we've long bemoaned, and finally it seems something is being done about it - notably in Switzerland, where a new law has been passed giving shareholders a binding vote on executive pay. Similar measures have been proposed in the UK, although the government's steadfast, but ultimately futile, support of the banking sector's inalienable right to pay itself disgustingly large sums of money suggests they aren't really very serious about addressing the issue.
And there is another rather ugly fly in the ointment, too. As I recently discussed with Eric Chalker, head of policy at the UK Shareholders' Association, even if UK shareholders were to get this binding vote, the voice of the many private shareholders who are forced to hold their shares in faceless nominee accounts still wouldn't be heard. This systemic shortcoming is clearly a fundamental flaw in shareholder democracy - and that's something that needs far greater protection than bankers' bonuses.
