MAY 3, 2025
Warren Buffett CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that he plans to step down from his role leading Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett, 94, serves as the conglomerate’s chairman and chief executive. He said Saturday that he will recommend to the Berkshire Hathaway board that Greg Abel become CEO at the end of 2025.
“I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end,” Buffett said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in Omaha.
Abel is chair of Berkshire Hathaway Energy and vice chair of Berkshire’s operations excluding insurance. Buffett has previously signaled that Abel would succeed him as CEO.
Although Buffett will give up his official duties, he plans to keep his large stake in the company and plans 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.
Other than Buffett’s children, most of Berkshire’s board of directors did not know of his intention to retire this year until his public announcement at the shareholder meeting, he said.
Buffett, whose sustained success as an investor earned him the nickname “Oracle of Omaha,” is the fifth-richest person in the world, according to Forbes Magazine — amassing a net worth of some $168 billion. He became chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway in 1970 and earned a reputation as a savvy stock picker whose investments outperformed the S&P 500 index more often than not.
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 in 2013.
Earlier in 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 on Saturday, 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 seven and a half 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.”
This is a developing story.
Courtesy/Source: Washington Post
