Renowned billionaire investor Warren Buffett has announced his retirement from leading Berkshire Hathaway by the end of the year. He has recommended Greg Abel as his successor to take over as chief executive officer.
Buffett’s success, combined with his ability to articulate his thinking in clear and concise terms, has made him highly influential within the business and financial communities, earning him the widely recognized moniker “The Oracle of Omaha.”
Several years prior, Buffett had already signaled that the 62-year-old Abel would be his preferred successor in an interview with CNBC.
“The time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end,” Buffett, 94, announced at an annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, the Midwestern city that serves as Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters.
Buffett expressed his belief that the board of directors would be “unanimously in favour of” his recommendation.
“I would still hang around and could conceivably be useful in a few cases, but the final word would be what Greg said in operations, in capital deployment, whatever it might be,” he elaborated.
Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a mid-sized textile company, which he acquired in the 1960s, into a massive conglomerate now valued at over $1 trillion, holding liquid assets amounting to $300 billion.
The company on Saturday reported first-quarter profits of $9.6 billion, a 14% decrease. This translates to $4.47 per share, also a significant decline.
Buffett’s net worth as of Saturday stood at $168.2 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s real-time rich list.
“I have no intention — zero — of selling one share of Berkshire Hathaway. I will give it away eventually,” Buffett assured shareholders, who responded with a standing ovation.
“The decision to keep every share is an economic decision because I think the prospects of Berkshire will be better under Greg’s management than mine.”
Abel, a long-standing key figure within Berkshire, joined the business group in the energy division in 1992 and has served on the board of directors since 2018.
“So that’s the news hook for the day,” Buffett remarked with a touch of humor.
Trade ‘should not be a weapon’
Earlier in the meeting, Buffett used the platform to declare that “trade should not be a weapon,” in remarks clearly directed at US President Donald Trump’s aggressive implementation of tariffs against various countries worldwide.
“There is no question that trade can be an act of war,” he stated, without explicitly mentioning Trump by name.
These comments came at a time when analysts both in the United States and internationally have voiced increasing concerns that tariffs could significantly impede global economic growth.
Two months prior, Buffett told a CBS interviewer that tariffs “are a tax on goods” — and not a relatively painless way to generate revenue, as Trump had suggested — adding, “I mean, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t pay ’em!”
On Saturday, Buffett urged Washington to maintain trade relations with the rest of the world, stating, “We should do what we do best and they should do what they do best. That’s what we did originally.”
Achieving prosperity is not a zero-sum game, where one country’s success necessitates another’s failure, he explained. Both can achieve prosperity simultaneously.
“I do think that the more prosperous the rest of the world becomes, it won’t be at our expense. The more prosperous we’ll become, and the safer we’ll feel,” Buffett affirmed.
He further cautioned that it can be perilous for one nation to offend the global community while asserting its own superiority.
“It’s a big mistake, in my view, when you have seven and a half billion people that don’t like you very well, and you’ve got 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they’ve done,” Buffett told the shareholders.
Compared to that dynamic, he concluded, the financial markets’ recent fluctuations are “really nothing.”
