Updated: 8:44 PM ET
Warren Buffett ((brk.a) and ((bk.b) announced on Saturday that he may resign before the end of the year.
Buffett has been one of the most successful investors of all time, famously evaluating prospects from a value perspective rather than chasing hot stocks.
Buffett announced as always, as always, in Omaha, Nebraska, where Berkshire is located, at the end of the annual meeting in Berkshire.
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The 94-year-old Buffett will be inherited by Greg Abel, who has long been the entertainment CEO of Berkshire.
The exact details of the departure still require some fine tuning. Buffett will outline his plans at a board meeting in Omaha on Sunday.
Buffett said he hopes the decision will be approved in a subsequent meeting within two months.
In this case, Abel will take over as CEO on January 1, 2026.
Since 2008, Canadian-born Abel, 62, has served as CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway Energy, a company with a huge power empire nationwide. Abel came to Berkshire in 1999 when he acquired Central American Energy. Buffett appointed Abel as his successor in 2021.
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When Buffett made the announcement, he said that no one had told him about his decision except his children Howard and Susan. Both are directed by Berkshire Hathaway.
Howard Buffett may take over as executive chairman.
Warren Buffett said after the transition, he expects to "hang out and be useful."
Presumably “useful” would include consulting on any large deals proposed by Abel and Berkshire.
The announcement shocked the annual meeting with about 19,000 attendees. The audience's response was to make Buffett applause for a long time.
Early in the Berkshire meeting, Buffett provided a comprehensive free trade defense and valued tariffs.
"Trade should not be used as a weapon," he told a questioner. "We should seek to trade with the rest of the world, we should do our best, they should do our best."
The problem, he said, is that too much uses trade as a weapon.
"I think designing a world that says 'ha-ha-ha, we win' is not a good idea," Buffett said. The rest of the countries are enviable.
Buffett doesn't want to sell any of his Berkshire stocks.
He is the largest holder of Berkshire-Hathaway. He owns 206,359 shares of the company's A-level stock, accounting for about 37% of the class. The shares closed at $809,350 per share on Friday, worth $167 billion.
He also owns 951 B-class stock, worth $513,000, based on Friday's $539.80 closure.
Berkshire's Class A and B shares rose about 1.8% on Friday, up about 19% so far this year. The S&P 500 index fell 3.3% this year.
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Berkshire's market value was $1.42 trillion as of Friday's close.
After Facebook-Parent Meta platform, this is good enough to rank eighth by market value ((Yuan) And before electric car maker Tesla ((TSLA) $913.7 billion.
Buffett was born and raised in Omaha and is the son of a stockbroker and a member of Congress. Buffett spent some time at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton and the University of Nebraska. He learned value investing from Benjamin Graham of Columbia University’s Business School.
He prefers to manage investments rather than acting as an agent. In 1965, Buffett bought controls from then-trodden textile manufacturer Berkshire Hathaway in 1965.
He also worked as an investor in The Washington Post, later dabbling in newspapers for a while, and later the owner of The Buffalo News in New York.
He became the controlling shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway in 1970. In 1978, Charles Munger joined Berkshire as vice chairman and effectively served as Buffett's business partner until Munger died in 2023 at the age of 93.
Munger convinced his friends to consider buying a very good company at a good price and let the managers build their business from there.
He then convinced a skeptical Buffett to consider buying Apple ((AAPL) On the ground, the tech giant is a great consumer company. Apple became Berkshire's largest and most successful investment to date - owning more than 1 billion shares.
Apple CEO Tim Cook was a participant at the Berkshire conference on Saturday.
Berkshire is now one of the largest groups in the country. Its holding includes GEICO insurance; BNSF Railroad (the largest railroad travel in the United States; rubrizole; pilots fly J Truck stop; see candy; Benjamin Moore's paint; Durachel battery; loom fruit and ice cream chain milk queen.
Its large portfolio includes:
The huge Apple shares have been pruned a lot over the past few years, with shares falling to 300 million shares as of Friday, worth about $62 billion.
Related: Apple CEO sends blunt messages to tariff impact
However, the reduction means Berkshire holds approximately $347 billion in investable shares in cash and short-term fiscal investment.
These shares are greater than the consolidated cash holdings of Apple Microsoft ((MSFT) Google Parents Letters ((GOOGL) and Amazon.com ((Amzn) .
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