Warren Buffett Reveals He Stepped Down After Finally Feeling His Age
The legendary investor, 94, opens up about his decision to hand the top job to Greg Abel; ‘How do you know the day that you become old?’
Warren Buffett can’t put his finger on exactly when he decided to hand over the reins of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B -1.57%decrease; red down pointing triangle to Greg Abel.
But in recent years Buffett observed just how much energy his appointed successor brought to each working day. And how his own days had slowed. The two men were operating at different speeds—increasingly so.
“There was no magic moment,” Buffett, now 94, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “How do you know the day that you become old?”
Berkshire shareholders and onlookers have long wondered how anyone could replace Buffett, for decades a towering figure in American business and finance. But as he passed his 90th birthday, Buffett began to experience something most people come to accept much earlier in life: his age.
“I didn’t really start getting old, for some strange reason, until I was about 90,” he said by phone from his office in Omaha, Neb. “But when you start getting old, it does become—it’s irreversible.”
He began to lose his balance, occasionally, and sometimes had trouble recalling a person’s name. Suddenly, the newspapers he read looked like they were printed with too little ink.
In the past year, those thoughts and feelings cohered into a decision. On May 3, at the Berkshire annual meeting, Buffett stunned the investing world when he revealed in the final minutes of his question-and-answer session his plan to step down as CEO in December and make way for Abel. Buffett will continue to serve as chairman of Berkshire’s board and has set no timeline for staying in that role.
Those filling the arena in Omaha fell silent as Buffett spoke before breaking into applause. Not even Abel, who was sharing a stage with him at that moment, knew what was coming.
Abel, 62, joined Berkshire through its 1999 investment in MidAmerican Energy, a Des Moines, Iowa, utility. Impressed with his successes in building out the company’s energy business, Buffett promoted Abel to vice chairman in 2018 and put him in charge of all of Berkshire’s noninsurance operations. By 2021, he was Buffett’s pick to succeed him as CEO.
“Really great talent is rare,” Buffett said. “It’s rare in business. It’s rare in capital allocation. It’s rare in almost every human activity you can name.”
Buffett was just 34 when he took control of Berkshire, then a struggling New England textile maker, in the spring of 1965. Over the years, he built it into a behemoth. Berkshire operates insurance companies, utilities and a railroad, as well as household brands from Dairy Queen to Duracell. The company’s massive stock portfolio holds big chunks of Apple and American Express.
As Berkshire evolved from Buffett’s investment vehicle to a sprawling conglomerate with nearly 400,000 employees, the skills required to keep the company humming changed, too. Buffett has praised Abel as both a manager and a dealmaker.
“The difference in energy level and just how much he could accomplish in a 10-hour day compared to what I could accomplish in a 10-hour day—the difference became more and more dramatic,” Buffett said. “He just was so much more effective at getting things done, making changes in management where they were needed, helping people that needed help someplace, but just all kinds of ways.
“It was unfair, really, not to put Greg in the job,” he added. “The more years that Berkshire gets out of Greg, the better.”
Few expected to hear those words in 2025. Many observers had thought Buffett might stay at Berkshire’s helm until he died. But Buffett said he never considered himself Berkshire’s CEO for life.
“I thought I would remain CEO as long as I thought I was more useful than anybody else, in terms of being CEO,” he said. “And it surprised me, you know, how long it went.”
And while his days as the CEO are now numbered, Buffett said he intends to keep working.
“My health is fine, in the sense that I feel good every day,” he said. “I’m here at the office and I get to work with people I love, that they like me pretty well, and we have a good time.”
While Buffett acknowledged his advancing age has dulled some of his abilities, he said he still possesses what is perhaps his most-prized, and rare, talent as an investor.
“I don’t have any trouble making decisions about something that I was making decisions on 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 60 years,” he told the Journal. “I will be useful here if there’s a panic in the market because I don’t get fearful when things go down in price or everybody else gets scared.
“And that really isn’t a function of age.”
Abel is the same way, Buffett said. While Abel’s assignment in recent years has been overseeing subsidiary companies, Buffett said he is also a successful investor. A buildup in Berkshire’s enormous pile of cash and Treasurys has drawn attention lately, as observers wonder where the company will find its next deal.
“He will have ideas about where money should be invested,” Buffett said.
The Abel era at Berkshire begins in less than eight months. And when it does, Buffett won’t be far. He plans to keep coming into his Omaha office.
“I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas,” he said with a laugh. “My interests are still the same.”
