Warren Buffett, 96, Handed the Berkshire Chairmanship to His Son Howard in a Letter Friday That Began 'Father Time Always Wins.' He Ran the Company for 61 Years and Turned Every Dollar Into More Than $55,000. Abel Says Howard 'Will Be Their Guardian.'
Buffett becomes chairman emeritus and stays on the board. Howard Buffett, 71, a director since 1993, takes the chair nine months after Greg Abel became CEO. Buffett told shareholders to think of his son 'as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against.'
Warren Buffett stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday, ending the last formal leadership role he held at the company he took control of in 1965 and turned into the most valuable non-technology business in America. The announcement came in a letter to shareholders that opened with a line Buffett, now 96, has been building toward for years: "Father Time always wins. He has, however, been generous with me."
His son Howard G. Buffett, 71, becomes chairman effective immediately. He has sat on the Berkshire board since 1993, and his father has said for more than a decade that Howard's job would be to protect the company's culture rather than run its businesses. The letter made that explicit. "Howard will guard its culture and values, both worth more than anything on our balance sheet," Buffett wrote. "Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against." Warren Buffett takes the title of chairman emeritus and stays on as a director.
The handover completes a succession that began in May 2025, when Buffett surprised the crowd at Berkshire's annual meeting in Omaha by announcing he would give up the chief executive job at the end of that year. Greg Abel, 64, the longtime head of Berkshire's non-insurance operations, took over as CEO on January 1 while Buffett kept the chairmanship. Friday's letter closes that arrangement after roughly nine months. "The company is in excellent hands, and I look forward to remaining a shareholder alongside you," Buffett wrote, adding that serving as chairman "has been the privilege of a lifetime, and I have never taken your trust for granted."
Abel responded with a statement of his own. "Warren's impact on Berkshire and its owners is without parallel in American business history," he said. "Howard will be their guardian."
The numbers behind that impact are the ones Berkshire prints at the front of every annual report. From 1965 through 2024, the company's per-share market value rose more than 5,500,000 percent, against roughly 39,000 percent for the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested over the same period. A dollar invested alongside Buffett at the start became more than $55,000. Berkshire became the first U.S. company outside the technology sector to reach a $1 trillion market value in 2024. Its portfolio of wholly owned businesses includes the BNSF railroad, Geico, Dairy Queen, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom and Benjamin Moore, and its stock holdings are led by an Apple stake worth close to $80 billion and a $27 billion position in Alphabet disclosed in July.
Buffett's own fortune stands at about $145 billion, which puts him 10th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He has given away nearly $50 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and has pledged more than 99 percent of his wealth to charity during his life or at his death. Much of that giving now flows through foundations run by his three children, including the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which has spent heavily on food security and, in recent years, on humanitarian work in Ukraine.
Markets took the news as a formality rather than a shock, which is what Berkshire spent a decade engineering. Class B shares edged up 0.11 percent to $509.77 on Friday, while Class A shares slipped 0.04 percent to $763,600.01. The board has known Howard Buffett for 33 years, Abel has run most of the operating companies for years, and investment managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler have handled growing slices of the stock portfolio.
What changes is symbolic, and in Buffett's case the symbolism is the point. He has been Berkshire's chairman since 1970 and its dominant figure since he bought a struggling New England textile mill in the mid-1960s. For 61 years the annual meeting, the plainspoken letter and the folding-table lunch in Omaha have all revolved around one man. Friday's letter is the last one he will sign as chairman.
Originally reported by CBS News.