The momentous, even epochal, announcement made by 94-year old GOAT investor and businessman Warren Buffett in the last five minutes of the 60th annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting held on May 3, 2025 was that he will be stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year, and that he will recommend the Berkshire board of directors name Greg Abel (who currently serves as Berkshire’s Vice Chairman Non-Insurance Operations) as the next CEO of the company. The announcement timing was a surprise to Greg, Ajit Jain (Vice Chairman of Insurance Operations), and every member of the Berkshire Hathaway board other than two of Buffett’s children who sit on the board.
A day later the Berkshire board of directors voted unanimously to elect Greg Abel to become President and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway starting on January 1, 2026. Warren Buffett will remain Chairman of the Board and will be available to help Greg, but Greg will be the ultimate decision-maker, and I believe Greg is ready. Warren Buffett and Greg Abel have worked together for 26 years, and Warren and Greg (and the board) have been preparing for this succession since at least 2018 when Greg was named a Vice Chairman and a member of the board of directors and then in 2021 when Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger officially announced that Greg would eventually become the next CEO of the company.
Warren made this announcement with Berkshire’s stock price at an all-time high and in a stadium filled with more than 40,000 of his grateful shareholders (and probably millions more watching live from around the world). I know that I, for one, choked up during the standing ovation as I thought about how much I’ve learned from studying Buffett over the years and how much my long-term ownership of Berkshire shares has meant to me financially. Buffett is not going anywhere for now, but I’m comfortable copying everyone else who has already said that this marks the end of an era, so it was emotional for many.
I’m going to save my thoughts on the future of Berkshire Hathaway for another time. Maybe I’ll do a podcast on it or something, but there are definitely questions that we will learn more about over time, maybe the most immediate one being will Warren continue to manage his very large sleeve of the equity portfolio or will responsibility for that turn over to Greg, Todd Combs, and Ted Weschler?
The most important takeaway for Berkshire shareholders (like myself) at this point is that Warren Buffett closed the meeting by saying “I have zero intention of selling one share of Berkshire Hathaway…it will get given away gradually” and that “the decision to keep every share is an economic decision because I think the prospects for Berkshire will be better under Greg.”
OK, onto everything else that was discussed at the meeting…
Buffett started the meeting by saying that it was the largest Berkshire meeting and that he thought it would end up being the best. And I’ll say I think it was the best I can remember in a long time. Warren spent a lot of time talking about the important and growing relationship that Berkshire has built with the five Japanese trading houses. He also talked about the need to invest in electrical and power infrastructure in the U.S., once again suggesting that the magnitude, urgency and regulatory complexity requires a war-time posturing by the U.S. government. He explained why he doesn’t want to be fully invested at all times (and rather lets cash build up on the balance sheet) and offered other advice for what it takes to be successful in the investing business (and in life). He said that successful investing requires patiently waiting and preparing (for years if necessary), but then being ready to act very fast when real opportunity strikes. He shared his disagreement with the trade war, and spent considerable time cautioning on the growing threat of nuclear war, and the unsustainable fiscal situation and his fear of ongoing currency debasement in the U.S. He actually said he was “scared” in reference to the U.S. fiscal deficit and inflation.
OK, that is enough from me. Please enjoy the quotes below. As always, any bold and underline are my own. Some of these quotes won’t be perfectly exact, but I think they are very close…
Disclosure: John Rotonti personally owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Investors should determine for themselves whether a particular service or product is suitable for their investment needs or should seek such professional advice for their particular situation. All statements made regarding companies, securities or other financial information contained in the article are strictly beliefs and points of view held by Bastion Fiduciary and are not endorsements of any company or security or recommendations to buy or sell any security.
“I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I’ve ever made Berkshire… Steve picked out Tim to succeed him, and he really made the right decision. Nobody but Steve could have created Apple, but nobody but Tim could have developed it like it has.”
“There is no question that trade can be an act of war… The United States should be looking to trade with the rest of the world, and we should do what we do best and they should do what they do best… we want a prosperous world. We have 8 countries with nuclear weapons, including a few that I would call quite unstable, so I don’t think it’s a great idea to try and design a world where a few countries say “ha, ha, ha we won” and other countries are envious.”
“Trade should not be a weapon… And we’ve won… and it’s a big mistake in my view when you have 7.5 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, and I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s wise… the more prosperous the rest of the world becomes, it won’t be at our expense. [The more prosperous the rest of the world becomes] the more prosperous we will become and the safer the world will feel and the safer your children will feel some day.”
“There were these five trading companies in Japan that were selling at ridiculously low prices and then we spent about a year acquiring [the shares] and then we got to know the people [running the companies] and everything that Greg and I saw we liked better as we went along. So, we got fairly close to the 10% limit that we told the companies we would never exceed without their permission so we did ask them recently if that limit could be relaxed and it’s in the process of being relaxed somewhat… in the next fifty years we won’t give a thought to selling those.”
“We have been treated extremely well by the five companies. They talk with Greg primarily.”
“We envision holding the investments [the five Japanese trading houses] fifty years or forever, but we’re also building relationships that do incremental things with each of those companies, and we really do hope to do big things with them globally. They bring different perspectives and different opportunities than we see and that’s why we’re building that long-term relationship with them.” – Greg Abel
“We will not be selling any stock [in the five Japanese Trading Houses]. That will not happen in decades, if then. My guess is they will find things, because they cover the world pretty much, we will find things occasionally that may be very large for any individual company there and they may in some way be assisted by some help we bring to the situation. That will be an expanding relationship.”
“It’s too bad that Berkshire has gotten as big as it has because we love that position [in Japan]… We’ve got in the range of $20 billion invested in them [the five Japanese Trading Houses], but I’d rather have $100 billion than $20 billion, and that’s the way I feel about it. Size is an enemy of performance at Berkshire, and I don’t know any good way to solve that problem, but it’s not an impossible problem at all. And the Japan investment has just been right up our alley.”
“As you said, Warren, it’s right up our alley, and I do believe we’ll see some very large opportunities long-term [partnering with the five Japanese trading houses], and that has been a great plus of that relationship.” – Greg Abel
“They [the five trading houses] would like to present us with opportunities and we would like to receive them. We’ve got they money, we get along very well with each other… it’s a perfect relationship and I just wish we could get more like it.”
“It’s amazing what you can find when you just turn the page… Turning every page is one important ingredient to bring to the investment field, and very few people do turn every page, and the ones that do turn every page aren’t going to tell you what they are finding so you’ve got to do a little of this yourself.”
“We came pretty close to spending $10 billion [on an acquisition] not that long ago, but we’d spend $100 billion. Those decision are not tough to make when something is offered that makes sense to us and that we understand and offers good value, and we don’t worry about losing.”
“The one problem with the investment business is things [opportunities] don’t come along in orderly fashion and they never will… we are running a business which is very, very, very opportunistic and Charlie always thought I did too many things. He thought if we did five things in our lifetime that we’d end up doing better than if we did fifty, and that we never concentrated enough. If we’ve got $335 billion right now in Treasuries, we would rather have conditions that develop where we would have like $50 billion or something like that, but that just isn’t the way this business works.”
“We have made a lot of money by not wanting to be fully invested at all times, and we don’t think it’s improper actually for people who are passive investors just to make a few simple investments and sit for their lives in them, but we’ve made the decision to be in the business so we think we can do a little better than that by behaving in a very irregular manner.”
“Let’s say we have roughly $40 billion per year coming in and we start with $335 billion [in cash on the balance sheet], if you told me I had to invest $50 billion every year until we got down to $50 billion [in cash on the balance sheet] that would be the dumbest thing in the world to invest in that manner. Things get extraordinarily attractive very occasionally.”
“The long-term trend is up, but nobody knows… I certainly don’t know, Greg doesn’t know, Ajit doesn’t know, nobody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, but they spend all their time talking about it because it’s easy to talk about, but it has no value. I never found anybody I wanted to listen to on the subject. On the other hand I find leafing through [big books of businesses/stocks] as a treasure hunt and every now and then you find something and occasionally, very occasionally, but it will happen again, but I don’t know when, it could be next week or it could be five years off, but it won’t be fifty years off you will be bombarded with offerings that we’ll be glad we have the cash for.”
“I wouldn’t trade everything that is developed in AI in the next ten years for Ajit…and I’m not kidding about that.”
“I look at the financial statements of 50 or 60 of our companies every month, and Marmon itself for example, owns over 100 companies… it was a remarkable company when we bought it but it was highly diversified already and then we’ve diversified it further, so it is something of a Berkshire within Berkshire.”
“America has been in significant revolutionary [he may have said evolutionary here] change ever since it was developed… we are always in the process of change. We will always find all kinds of things to criticize in the country, but the luckiest day of my life was the day I was born. I was born in the United States… I was just lucky. I was lucky to be born male. I was lucky to be born white. But if you don’t think the United States has changed since I was born in 1930, we’ve gone through all kinds of things. We’ve gone through great recessions, we’ve gone through world wars, we’ve gone through the development of the atomic bomb that we never dreamt of so I would not get discouraged about the fact that it doesn’t look like we’ll solve every problem that has come along, but we’re all pretty lucky.”
“There are times when you have to act fast. In fact, we made a great deal of money because we were willing to act faster than anybody around… the trick is when you get in a room with somebody and they want to sell you something for $6 million and it has $2 million on cash, and $2 million of real estate, and its making $2 million a year, you don’t want to be patient then. You want to be patient waiting to get the occasional call. My phone will ring sometime with something that wakes me up. But you just never know when it will happen and that’s what makes it fun… it’s a combination of patience and a willingness to do something that afternoon if it comes to you. You don’t want to be patient about acting on deals that make sense.”
“We are very patient when we are looking at opportunities and we want to act quickly, but while we are being patient, never underestimate the amount of reading and work that is being done to be prepared to act quickly because we do know equities and a variety of private companies that when the opportunity presents itself, we are ready to act.” – Greg Abel
“The main thing you have to do is you have to be willing to hang up after five seconds and you have to be willing to say yes after five seconds.”
“You can’t be filled with self-doubt in this business, just forget it. Go on to some other activity.”
“One of the great pleasures in this business is having people trust you. Why work at ninety when you’ve got more money than anybody can count. It [still working] means nothing in terms of how you’re going to live or how your children are going to live, but both Charlie and I enjoyed the fact that people trusted us… we never sought out professional investors to join our partnerships. Among all my partners I never had a single institution, and I never wanted an institution.”
“You don’t want to be patient when things are going your way and the time comes to act. You want to get it done that day.”
“Todd has done a great job for us in terms of turning around [Geico]. When he took over there were two major issues that Geico was behind its competitors on. First is matching rate to risk and secondly telematics. We were at the bottom of the list as far as telematics was concerned about five or six years ago. Since then we have made rapid strides and telematics which used to be a source of competitive disadvantage to us is no longer so, and I would argue that our telematics at Geico is about as good as anyone else’s today. So that has been one huge catchup. Secondly, in terms of matching rate to risk, again I think we have caught up with our competitors and we are as good as anyone else in the field. All this together with the cost reduction effort at Geico… Todd has basically reduced the workforce from 50,000 down to 30,000… that translates to at least $2 billion per quarter… In the last 7 quarters Geico has shown a combined ratio that has an 8 in front of it and I never thought I’d live to see the day when anyone could have a combined ratio as so low as it is right now… it’s income translates to the largest profit anyone is making on the underwriting side in the personal automobile business. We have achieved a lot. Todd has achieved a lot, but I do not want to be so arrogant as to say ‘mission accomplished.’ I still think we need to do a lot more in technology… and we need to be in a state of readiness for AI.” – Ajit Jain
“The only other thing I’d like to add is that in addition to the [$2 billion in quarterly] underwriting profit, Geico provides $29 billion of float.” – Ajit Jain
“You get a few breaks in life in terms of people you will meet who will just change your life dramatically. You need a handful of those, and when you get them, you treasure them.”
“You have a wonderful group of businesses and an ability to do things that no one else can do, which is hard to get in a capitalistic system that has been developed as fully as the United States has been… it would be very, very hard to develop anything like it.”
“By nature, I’m somewhat critical of everything… I’m always looking for what’s wrong.”
“If you find people that are wonderful to work with, that’s the place to go.”
“Be very careful of who you work for because you will take on the habits of the people around you.”
“You don’t want to do anything to risk what has been created. So if very stupid things are happening around you, you do not want to participate. If people are making more money because they are borrowing money or they are participating in securities that are really pieces of junk, but they hope to find a bigger sucker later on, you just have to forget that.”
“It’s a pretty wonderful life.”
“Obviously we wouldn’t want to own anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell, and that’s the big thing we worry about with the United States currency… there will be a push towards weaker currency and I mentioned very briefly in the annual report that fiscal policy is what scares me in the United States.”
“The natural course of government is to make the currency worth less over time and that has important consequences, and it’s very hard to build checks and balances into the system to keep that from happening.”
“Devalue of currency is a scary thing and we don’t have any great system for beating that.”
“There could be things that could happen in the United States that would make us want to own a lot of other currencies.”
“We don’t want to go into any country where we think there is a significant probability of run-away inflation. Other people have figured out ways to make money in hyper-inflationary situations, but that is not our game and I don’t think I’d play it well.”
“There is no question that private equity firms have come into the [life insurance] space and we are no longer competitive in this space. We used to do a fair amount of business in this [life insurance] space but in the last three or four years I don’t think we’ve done a single deal. The private equity firms that you mentioned are all very active in the life end of the business, not in the property casualty end of the business… As long as the economy is good and credit spreads are low, the private equity firms will make a lot of money because of leverage. However, there is always the danger that at some point the regulator might get cranky and say you are taking on too much risk on behalf of your policy holders and that could end in tears. We do not like the risk/reward that these situations offer and therefore we have put up the white flag and said we can’t compete in this segment right now.” – Ajit Jain
“There are people that want to copy Berkshire’s model, but usually they don’t want to also copy the model of the CEO having all of his money in the company forever and they have a different equation and they probably have a somewhat different fiduciary feeling about what they are doing and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work they go onto other things. And if what we do at Berkshire doesn’t work then I spend the rest of my life regretting what I’ve created. So, it’s just a whole different personal equation and there is no property casualty company that can replicate Berkshire.”
“Ajit came with us in 1986 and at that point the other folks should have given up.”
“Who you associate with is just enormously important. You are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people you work with, who you admire, and who you become friends with… they are people that make you want to be better than you are and you want to hang out with people that are better than you are and that you feel are better than you are because you are going to go in the direction of the people that you associate with.”
“If someone is going to be helpful to you then you want to try to figure out ways to be helpful to them so you get a compounding of good intentions and good behavior, and unfortunately you can get the reverse of that in life too.”
“Different professions select for different types of people.”
“I think a happy person lives longer than somebody who is doing some things that they don’t admire that much in life.”
“What has happened in the last 30 days, 45 days, or 100 days is really nothing. There has been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire [stock] has gone down 50% over a very short period of time. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the company, but this [recent stock market sell-off] is not a huge move… this has not been a dramatic bear market or anything of the sort.”
“If it makes a difference to you whether your stocks are down 15% or not you need to get a somewhat different investment philosophy because the world is not going to adapt to you, you are going to have to adapt to the world and you will see a period, certainly in the next twenty years, you will see a period that somebody in the market once described as a ‘hair curler’ compared to anything you’ve seen before. It just happens periodically. The world makes big, big mistakes and surprises happen in dramatic ways and the more sophisticated the system gets the more the surprises can be out of right field. That’s just part of the stock market and what makes it a good place to focus your efforts if you’ve got the proper temperament for it and a terrible place to get involved if you get frightened by markets that decline and get excited when stock markets go up… people have emotions, but you’ve got to check them at the door when you invest.”
“People get extraordinary bad luck and others get extraordinarily good luck.”
“For 94 years I’ve been able to drink whatever I want to drink [holding up a cherry Coca-Cola]. They predict it’s going to do terrible things to me, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
“We expect change in all our businesses… the world changes. If the game didn’t change it all, it really wouldn’t be very interesting.”
“It [the future] will be different than you think.”
“We have unusual advantages in the insurance business that really can’t be replicated by the competition.”
“We expect $40 billion per year in investment income.”
“Holding a lot more cash and Treasuries than I would like but we really only get real opportunities every 5 or 6 years and you have to be patient.”
“Every now and then you get extraordinary opportunities and most of the time you don’t have much of an edge.”
“Clearly we are heads and shoulders above anyone else [in insurance float.]” – Ajit Jain
“Our float is absolutely free money [because of our underwriting profitability and the ability to replace float every year].”
“Our cost of float is 2.2% negative.” – Ajit Jain
“I wouldn’t be talking about it [our float] if I thought they [our competitors] could duplicate it.”
“I spend more time looking at balance sheets than I do at income statements… I look at balance sheets over an eight or ten-year period before I even look at the income statement.”
“The country needs incredible improvement, rethinking, and redirection of the grid. We’ve outgrown the model that America should have, and in a sense it’s a problem akin to the interstate highway system when you needed the power of the government to get things done… that is a clear and present use of hundreds of billions of dollars… The way to handle it is to have some kind of a government-private industry cooperation similar to what you do in a war… We’re at that point in terms of energy but I don’t think we’ve made any progress.”
“The capital required to meet the long-term needs of what is currently projected for electricity demand is enormous.” – Greg Abel
“If you’re doing something where you are going to lose, the big thing to do is quit.”
“We’re not in the business of trying to solve insolvable problems.”
“Some states are rat poison to operate a utility in [because of how utilities are treated by regulators].”
“Berkshire Hathaway Energy [BHE] is worth considerably less money than it was two years ago because of societal factors… the public utility business is not as good of a business as it was a couple years ago… values change, and they don’t always change upward.”
“Our enthusiasm for buying public utilities companies is different now than it would have been a couple years ago.”
“It’s particularly dramatic in public utilities because they are going to need lots of money so if you’re going to need lots of money you should probably behave in a way that encourages people to give you lots of money.”
“We will make our best deals when people are the most pessimistic.”
“Opportunities happen because humans and humans.”
“I don’t get fearful by things that other people are afraid of in a financial way.”
“Let’s say Berkshire went down 50% next week, I’d think of that as a fantastic opportunity, and it wouldn’t bother me in the least.”
“It’s not that I don’t have emotions, but I don’t have emotions about the price of stocks.”
“Berkshire will increase its earnings power over time as we retain earnings. We will build the earnings power, but it won’t come in an even stream.”
“A lot of people have gotten very rich in the country by figuring out how to get other people to put up the capital.”
“Investment management is a very good game because other people put up the capital and you charge them for the capital. It’s a well-designed business for the people that practice it.”
“The trick lies in getting somebody else’s capital and get an override on it…but that didn’t appeal to Charlie and I… I did do it for about 12 years but I put up my own capital and shared the losses, but we did get an override on other people’s capital… it’s a very good business but it can lead to a lot of abuse.”
“It’s an interesting system we’ve developed, but it has worked. It dispenses rewards in what seems like a terribly capricious manner. It’s hard to make the argument that people get what they deserve in life.”
“Books talk to me. Numbers talk to me.”
“I literally read every book on investing in the Omaha public library [as a kid].”
“I think bureaucracy is amazingly prevalent and contagious in our capitalist system.”
“It scares you to some extent what the future of the currency will be because they can print currency.”
“We are operating at a fiscal deficit now that is unsustainable over a long period of time… if something can’t go on forever, it will end.”
“We are doing something that is unsustainable… it has the aspect to it that it gets uncontrollable and essentially you just give up on it.”
“We’ve had very substantial inflation in the U.S., but it’s never been runaway yet and that’s not something we want to try and experiment with because it feeds on itself. I wouldn’t want the job of trying to correct what’s going on with the revenue and expenditures in the U.S. with a 7% gap when probably a 3% gap is sustainable. It’s a job that I don’t want, but it’s a job that I think should get done, and Congress doesn’t seem to be doing it.”
“We have a lot of problems in this country, but this [deficit] is a problem we bring on ourselves… we have a capital producing stream and brain producing stream like the world has never seen, and if you picked a way to screw it up, it would involve the currency.”
“It’s a real mistake to lecture a bunch of people [the rest of the world] that’s you’ve won the game.”
“Having 9 nuclear powers [pretty soon with Iran] is a mistake society cannot afford to make.”
“I do think that fundamental to all of it though is having a currency that does not get debased. What that does to society is all the people that trust government get screwed and all the people that figure out ways to profit off of it become rich or richer, and I don’t think you want a society that operates in that manner.”
“It’s easier for an organization to see its culture to move downward than to move upward… once you start deviating downward it is really contagious and it is hard to rebuild.”
“You can’t say the system is a failure but you can say it’s very difficult to make major changes in it.”
“I’ve never had to work for anybody I didn’t admire, and that’s a luxury in life.”
“I’ve been able to choose what I do with my day to an extraordinary degree.”
“The time has arrived where Greg should become the CEO of the company at year end…if approved by the board that would mean Greg would be the CEO of Berkshire… I would hang around and maybe be useful, but the final word would be whatever Greg says.”
“Berkshire has a special reputation such that when there are times of trouble for the government Berkshire is seen as an asset.”
“Greg will be the chief executive, period [if the board approves]. And Greg didn’t’ know anything about this until what he’s hearing right now.”
“I have zero intention of selling one share of Berkshire Hathaway… it will get given away gradually.”
“The decision to keep every share is an economic decision because I think the prospects for Berkshire will be better under Greg.”