Warren Buffett retires as Berkshire Hathaway CEO

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After six decades in the job he bought for himself with what he’s called the “dumbest” investment of his life, Wednesday was Warren Buffett’s last day as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO.

His strategy of using insurance premiums, “float,” to make brilliant investments in stocks and to help buy entire companies transformed the struggling textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate and made him one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of more than $150 billion.

He has already given away stock currently valued at $208 billion and has directed his children to eventually donate virtually all that’s left.

It isn’t really a “retirement.” At the age of 95, he will remain chairman of the board and still plans to come to the company’s Omaha HQ as much as he ever did.

But he has said he will be “going quiet … sort of” and will leave all the decision making to the new CEO, Greg Abel, who has been serving as vice-chairman of non-insurance operations since 2018. Abel first joined Berkshire in 2000 when it closed its deal to take a controlling stake in MidAmerican Energy, where he was president.

Still, when Buffett announced at the May annual meeting that he planned to step down at the end of the year, he expected he could be helpful, especially if “we ran into periods of great opportunity or anything.”

Becky Quick, CNBC’s longtime Berkshire/Buffett correspondent, noted on Wednesday’s “Squawk Box” that “for the most part” Abel has been running the non-insurance companies “for years now” and has done a “phenomenal job” at making sure things run smoothly and dealing with a lot of the problems that Buffett didn’t want to handle himself.

She expects it will be helpful for Abel to have Buffett and his 30% voting control as a “fireshield to anybody who wants to come along and say that you’re not Warren Buffett, this is not your company.”

For several years already, Abel has been putting his own stamp on the way Berkshire manages its wholly owned subsidiaries.

Back in 2023, in a section of the newsletter with the headline, “Things are already beginning to change at Berkshire,” we reported on a CNBC interview in Japan with Buffett and Abel.

While both men were smiling and almost playing it as a joke, it was clear Abel was much more involved in the management of the subsidiaries, in contrast to Buffett’s famously decentralized hands-off approach.

At the 1999 annual meeting, Buffett and Munger said their “non-interference has enormous value, at least with the kind of managers and the kind of businesses that have joined us.”

“Not only do people have more time to work on the productive things, but I think they probably actually appreciate the fact that they’re left alone.”

Twenty-four years later, Buffett said, “Our managers like autonomy, but they also get lonesome… I give them the autonomy, but Greg gives them both, and he gets somewhat more discipline out of the managers … than I would get.”

Earlier this month, Berkshire announced it was adding a new layer of management, appointing the CEO of its NetJets subsidiary to “support the outstanding CEOs of our 32 consumer products, service and retailing businesses, and uphold Berkshire’s culture and values.”

But while Berkshire is beginning to change, it won’t be a dramatic overnight shift.

As shareholder Ann Winblad told CNBC’s “The Exchange” Wednesday, while the company will “operate differently” with a new CEO it won’t “fundamentally change in its strategies.”

Andrew Bary at Barron’s writes Buffett’s continued presence at the company “could mean that important matters such as a potential dividend [which Buffett has consistently opposed], stock buybacks, and the deployment of Berkshire’s cash balance of more than $350 billion could remain unresolved for some time, perhaps until after Buffett’s death.”

Over the very long run, however, it will be difficult for Berkshire to avoid becoming more like other corporations that don’t have Buffett’s spectacular success to shield management from impatient investors who are likely to push the company to abandon his insistence on waiting for the right opportunities and resisting the typical C-suite compulsion to justify its existence by constantly doing “something.”

Another big unknown is what will happen to Berkshire’s stock price without Buffett as CEO.

This year, it trailed the benchmark S&P 500 index as investors reacted negatively to Buffett’s early-May announcement that he would be handing over the job to Abel at year-end.

The A shares closed at an all-time high of $809,350 the day before Buffett dropped his surprise.

It then fell 14.4% to its closing low of the year of $692,600 on August 4.

The shares have partially rebounded to end the year at $754,800, up almost 10.9% for 2025. 

The more widely held B shares followed almost the same exact trajectory.

Meanwhile, the S&P rallied to a 16.4% gain for the year after coming close to falling into a bear market in April following President Trump’s tariffs announcement.

As a result, what had been a 22.4 percentage point overperformance for Berkshire’s B shares in May turned into a 5.5 percentage point deficit as the year ended.

With dividends included, the S&P returned 17.9% this year, increasing Berkshire’s underperformance to 7.0 percentage points vs a slim 0.5 percentage point win in 2024.

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Buffett’s career and accomplishments

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Berkshire and its stock price

What’s next?

CHARLIE MUNGER: I have avoided, all my life, the compensation consultants.

To me it’s a — I hardly can find the words to express my contempt. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I will say this. If the board hires a compensation consultant after I go, I will come back. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Mad! Mad!

So I think there’s a lot of mumbo jumbo in this field, and I don’t see it going away.

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, it isn’t going to go away. No, it’s going to get worse. It — I mean, the — if you look at —

I mean, the way compensation gets handled, it — you know, everybody looks at everybody else’s proxy statement and says, “We can’t possibly hire a guy that hasn’t been — “

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s ridiculous.

WARREN BUFFETT: — so on. And the human relations department, you know, who work for the CEO, come in and suggest a consultant.

What consultant is ever going to get another assignment if he says, “You should pay your CEO below the — down in the fourth quartile because you’re getting a fourth quartile result?” It — I mean, it just, you know —

It isn’t that the people are evil or anything. It’s just the nature of the situation just — it produces a result that is not consistent with how representatives of the owners should behave.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s even worse than that. Capitalism is the golden goose that we all live on.

And if people generally get so they have contempt for it because they don’t like the pay arrangements in the system, your capitalism may not last as well.

And that’s like killing the golden goose.

So I think the existing system has a lot wrong with it.

BRK.A stock price: $754,800.00

BRK.B stock price: $502.65

BRK.B P/E (TTM): 16.07

Berkshire market capitalization: $1,084,815,990,868

Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)

Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)

No Berkshire stock repurchases since May 2024.

(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)

Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 14, 2025, except for:

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at [email protected]. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

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Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.

Happy New Year!

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch