Warren Buffett to retire later this year, ending run for an investing titan
Buffett, 94, built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the world’s most formidable economic enterprises.
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Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett in Omaha in May 2024. (Scott Morgan/Reuters)
By Todd C. Frankel and Maegan Vazquez
Warren Buffett, still full of folksy wisdom and with that ever-present red can of Coca-Cola close at hand, said Saturday that he plans to step down later this year from his role leading Berkshire Hathaway, ending a run as an investment manager and CEO that was so stunningly successful for so long that it earned him the nickname “the Oracle of Omaha.”
Buffett, 94, built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling maker of suit linings in the 1960s into one of the world’s most formidable economic enterprises with a $1 trillion market cap — the first U.S. non-tech company to reach that milestone.
Along the way, Buffett earned a reputation for making shrewd, long-term investments in a wide range of mostly U.S. companies while extolling the virtues of patient and emotionless decision-making. Berkshire has held huge stakes in consumer icons such as Domino’s Pizza, Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz to go with holdings in insurers, railways and oil companies. He and his partners mostly eschewed investing fads and cast skeptical eyes on corporate claims that sounded too good to be true.
Berkshire’s success transformed the company’s annual shareholders meetings, narrated by Buffett’s wide-ranging commentary, into popular events known as “Woodstock for capitalists,” attracting tens of thousands of investors to Omaha. His annual letters to shareholders were mined for nuggets of investing wisdom.
Near the end of Berkshire’s 60th annual meeting Saturday, Buffett revealed that he will recommend to the company’s board that longtime executive Greg Abel take over as CEO at the end of 2025.
Buffett has previously signaled that his successor would be Abel, who already oversees Berkshire’s Wall Street investments and has spent more than two decades at the company. The announcement’s timing was something of a surprise. Other than Buffett’s children, most of Berkshire’s board of directors — including Abel — did not know of his intention to retire this year, he said.
Buffett — the fifth-richest person in the world, according to Forbes Magazine — said he plans to keep his large stake in the company and to remain an informal presence there. “I would still hang around and conceivably be useful in a few cases, but the final word would be what Greg said,” Buffett said.
Buffett’s departure comes two years after the death of Buffett’s longtime business partner and Berkshire vice chair Charlie Munger in 2023 at age 99.
Berkshire director Ron Olson told CNBC that he hoped Buffett could continue to play an advisory role reminiscent of Munger’s relationship with the company.
“I am very anxious to see Warren become the Charlie Munger for Greg Abel,” Olson said.
Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio for decades included a stake in The Washington Post Co., then controlled by the Graham family. He stepped down from The Post board in 2011. The newspaper was sold to billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder and then-chief executive of Amazon, in 2013.
In a social media post Saturday, former Post executive Don Graham recalled how Buffett met his mother, Katharine Graham, when she was Post publisher and CEO in the early 1970s.
“She came back and said ‘Don, this is the smartest guy I ever met,’” Don Graham wrote. “For the next 28 years, his advice in large and small company matters helped her be a very successful CEO. He came as close as anyone could to overcoming her boundless doubt in her own business ability.”
Buffett’s success was notable for how much it differed from how others accumulated their vast fortunes and how little the money seemed to change him.
He has famously lived in the same five-bedroom home in Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500. With the country’s wealth engines centered on the coasts — Silicon Valley to the West, Wall Street in the East — Buffett has stayed in the heartland of Nebraska. He has said he eats a simple breakfast from McDonald’s most mornings before work. He has said he drinks several cans of Coke a day.
Buffett admitted to some indulgences. He eventually embraced private jet travel, with Berkshire Hathaway buying the NetJets corporate aircraft company.
But he didn’t buy his first computer until 1994, at the urging of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a close friend. Buffett held off investing in tech stocks for even longer, though he has since dived in — at the end of 2024, Apple stock made up more than 20 percent of Berkshire’s holdings, according to corporate filings. Buffett has jokingly said he wouldn’t mind owning all of Apple’s stock.
As a disciple of investing guru Benjamin Graham, Buffett was a proponent of value investing — finding companies that had been overlooked by other investors. He was distrustful of “adjusted earnings” and financial engineering aimed at making the numbers look better than they should.
He became a millionaire in 1962, based on the value of his corporate stake. By 1985, Forbes estimated Buffett’s net worth at $1 billion.
As Berkshire’s track record for picking winners grew, its investment decisions increasingly were viewed as signs of faith. More investors usually followed. Corporate fortunes were buoyed. That was especially important during the 2008 financial crisis, when stock markets tanked and the economy teetered. Berkshire made a very public show of investing $5 billion into Goldman Sachs to prop up the struggling investment firm. The funding and show of confidence was credited with helping avert the worst damage.
Buffett also has not shied away from sharing his opinion, to the delight of the followers of his investment advice. He has spoken out against private equity deals, leveraged buyouts and how most hedge funds operate.
“When trillions of dollars are managed by people charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients,” he wrote in Berkshire’s shareholder in 2016.
His 2017 letter called out the use of debt to finance deals, writing it is “insane to risk what you have and need in order to obtain what you don’t need.”
He also has called for changes to the U.S. tax system so that wealthy people pay more. During the Obama administration, the White House got his endorsement for what they called the “Buffett rule,” which asserted that richer households should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families. Buffett pointed out that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary because most of his money comes from investments rather than a salary.
During Saturday’s meeting, Buffett criticized tariffs and defended global trade, arguing that the United States stands to prosper by continuing to trade with international partners freely.
Buffett had previously refrained from publicly weighing in on President Donald Trump’s efforts to levy sweeping tariffs on American adversaries and allies alike. Buffett did not directly reference Trump, but he told the Omaha audience that “trade should not be a weapon.”
“Trade can be an act of war,” Buffett said. “And I think it’s led to bad things, just the attitudes it’s brought out in the United States.”
A trade war threatens to isolate the United States from the rest of the world, Buffett said.
“It’s a big mistake, in my view, when you have 7½ billion people that don’t like you very well, and you have 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they’ve done,” he said. “I don’t think it’s right and I don’t think it’s wise.”
Todd C. Frankel is an enterprise reporter on The Washington Post's Financial desk. He joined The Washington Post in 2014. Frankel is a one-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
Maegan Vazquez is a politics breaking news reporter. She joined The Washington Post in 2023.
