Warren Buffett stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday, ending a 56-year run atop the board of the $1 trillion conglomerate, and handed the role to his son Howard as the final step of a succession plan set in motion years ago.
The company announced the change in a statement and a letter to shareholders published Friday morning. Buffett, 96, becomes chairman emeritus effective immediately and stays on the board as a director. Howard Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, takes over as chairman. Susan L. Decker continues as lead independent director.
“Father Time always wins,” Buffett wrote. “He has, however, been generous with me. He has given me the opportunity to see Berkshire reach a point where I am more confident than ever about what lies ahead.”
Buffett said the timing follows CEO Greg Abel’s performance since taking over on January 1. “He has taken hold of the Chief Executive Officer job in every respect. He has been making the decisions that matter for some time now, and I have not had to think twice about any of them,” the letter read. He also noted his great-grandson, who just turned one, is “moving a bit faster than I am these days.”
An insurance policy, in Buffett’s words
The most quoted line of the letter describes the new chairman’s mandate. “Greg runs the company; 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.”
Abel, in a statement on behalf of the board, said Warren’s impact on Berkshire and its owners is “without parallel in the history of American business,” adding that the culture Buffett built will remain at the heart of the company and that Howard will be its guardian.
Howard Buffett has spent 33 years on the Berkshire board, a tenure his father noted was a longer apprenticeship than Buffett himself served before taking the reins at 34. Outside Berkshire, Howard chairs the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a charity focused on global food security and conflict mitigation.
The end of a two-stage exit
Friday’s move completes a transition that ran in stages. Buffett stunned shareholders at the May 2025 annual meeting by announcing he would step down as CEO at year-end, with the board voting the next day to install Abel. Abel, who built Berkshire Hathaway Energy into one of North America’s largest regulated utility groups and was named vice chair in 2018, took office January 1, the first change at the top since Buffett took control in 1965.
Since then Abel has put the company’s cash to work. Berkshire renewed share buybacks to the tune of about $4.8 billion and bought a major stake in Alphabet, moves investors watched closely for a hint of how the new CEO would deploy the war chest. Abel has also spoken publicly about AI as a growth driver for Berkshire’s energy business, telling Reuters this month the technology creates opportunity across the utility portfolio.
That war chest is large. Berkshire held $365.5 billion in cash as of the latest reporting, and CNBC noted investors would welcome Abel putting more of it into buybacks. Berkshire shares have lagged: the stock is up about 1% in 2026 while the S&P 500 has rallied more than 11%, and Class B shares trail the index by roughly 10 percentage points.
A quiet market reaction
Shares of Berkshire were little changed on the news, according to CNN’s market desk. The muted response reflects how much of the transition had already been priced. Buffett’s CEO exit was announced 16 months ago, Abel has run operations since January, and Howard’s elevation to chairman had been telegraphed for years.
The scale of what is being handed over is hard to overstate. Buffett turned a struggling New England textile mill into a conglomerate with $44.5 billion in 2025 operating earnings and nearly 400,000 employees. He has given away roughly $66 billion in stock since 2006 and plans to donate 99.5% of his wealth through a charitable trust overseen by his children. His net worth stands around $145 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, ranking him tenth globally.
Academics framed the change as orderly. Michael Withers, a management professor at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said Buffett carried out the succession step by step, a deliberate approach that contrasts with the abrupt founder exits common in American business.
What to watch next
Three questions follow the announcement. Whether Abel keeps deploying cash aggressively, whether Berkshire’s operating businesses hold their unusual autonomy under a more hands-on CEO, and whether Howard’s non-executive chairmanship can actually preserve a culture built on trust delegated to subsidiary managers. Reuters reported the company’s explicit goal is keeping that culture intact as Howard ascends.
There is also the question of what Buffett does with his remaining stake and his time. He stopped giving Berkshire shares to the Gates Foundation earlier this year and said he was no longer talking to Bill Gates, ending one of philanthropy’s most famous partnerships. The bulk of his giving now routes through the family trust.
Buffett remains a director and, by his own account, still holds the best job in the world. “I have served Berkshire since 1965,” he wrote. “Sixty-plus years in, I still have the best job in the world. That is not something many people my age can say, and I have never felt better about what comes next.”