Buffett hands over the chair at 96: Greg Abel runs Berkshire, Howard guards its culture (2026)

The letter to shareholders that Berkshire Hathaway published on Friday, September 18, runs to about a page. Its author, Warren Buffett, 96, used it to give up the chairman's post he had held since 1970 and to hand it to his son Howard. Buffett becomes chairman emeritus, keeps his seat on the board, and Greg Abel, chief executive since January, goes on running the company. Susan Decker stays on as lead independent director. 1 2

The sentence at the centre of the letter is a claim about where Berkshire's value sits:

"Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values — both worth more than anything on our balance sheet. Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against." 1

Buffett signed off by naming the reason for the timing: "Father Time always wins. 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." 1

What actually changed at Berkshire

One job became three. Abel holds operating authority. Howard Buffett, 71, takes the chair as a non-executive role whose brief is the company's culture and long-term operating philosophy; he has been a Berkshire director for 33 years, a longer apprenticeship, Buffett noted, than the one he served before taking over at 34. 3

Buffett keeps a third source of weight: he remains a director and Berkshire's largest shareholder, with more than 13% of the stock and about 30% of the voting power. Both stakes shrink as his shares pass to foundations overseen by his children. 3

The company he is leaving is worth roughly $1 trillion, earned $44.5 billion in operating earnings last year and employs close to 400,000 people. Its shares compounded at 19.7% a year under Buffett across six decades, close to double the S&P 500's return over the same stretch. He remained a working chairman through his final year: Abel said in March that Buffett still came into the Omaha office every day. 2

The judgment inside the split

Berkshire's balance sheet carries a railroad, an insurer, an energy business and a stock portfolio. Buffett's sentence sets the culture above all of it and gives that culture its own guardian. The metaphor comes from the company's main business: an insurance policy is something the owner pays for against a loss they expect never to arrive, and the whole point of holding one is that it sits there unused. Read plainly, the sentence assigns the chairman a safeguard's role. Howard is there in case the standard breaks, and the standard itself is meant to hold the company together without him acting at all.

Howard Buffett has described that standard in his own words. He told the Wall Street Journal in January 2025: "The culture is to keep things simple, to do what you need to do but don't do a lot of things you don't need to do, treat people fairly, respect your managers, respect your shareholders. Tell them the bad news upfront, be honest." 3

Shareholders have treated the handover as a change of management rather than a repricing event. Berkshire's shares were little changed on the news 4, and they sit up about 1% this year while the S&P 500 has gained more than 11%. Rising oil prices and the market's appetite for faster-growing companies explain part of that gap, and so does an open question about whether Abel can put the company's $365.5 billion of cash to work as well as Buffett did. He has made a start, lifting buybacks to $4.5 billion in the second quarter. 2

The arrangement will be tested in a market Buffett never ran. Michael Withers, a management professor at the University of Notre Dame, framed the standard: "The test moving forward will be whether Abel and Howard can honor [Warren Buffett's] legacy while still giving Berkshire room to adapt to a market that looks very different from the one Buffett mastered." 3 One marker of that different market landed two days before the letter, when the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate for the first time since 2023, to a range of 3.75% to 4%. 5

What the letter leaves open

Three things stay open. Howard Buffett has never run a public company, and Cathy Seifert of CFRA Research called that a shortcoming of the succession plan, noting that heirs in other family dynasties usually arrive with day-to-day operating experience. 3

The chairman's new power runs in one direction. Howard can stop a decision he reads as a break with the standard; starting one sits with Abel. 3

Buffett's own influence is on a schedule. The 13% stake and 30% of the votes that underwrite his assurance today decline as the shares go to his children's foundations. 3 Longtime Berkshire owners are watching the arrangement and saying so. James Armstrong, president of Henry H. Armstrong Associates, described Howard's function as that of "a watchdog," with the job of keeping bureaucracy small, shareholders first and the moat around Berkshire's businesses wide. Tom Russo of Gardner, Russo & Quinn put the situation in four words: "This is new territory." 3

What to check when a founder hands over the chair

Buffett's letter works as a checklist for any company whose founder is stepping back.

Get the durable asset named out loud. Buffett named Berkshire's in one written sentence, at the moment of handover. When a departing owner never says what made the business durable, that omission deserves more of your attention than the farewell does.
Sort the three jobs. Operating authority, the standard, and the votes. Ask which one the founder held, which one they handed over, and which one they kept. At Berkshire the three now sit with Abel, Howard and Buffett, and Buffett's slice shrinks every year. A guardian can halt a change to the standard, and building anything new is the CEO's work. 3
Look for the standard in decisions that cost money. Buffett's test for the owners he wanted was that they "thought in decades rather than quarters." 1 Run the same test on a company you own: read how it writes down a failed investment, what it tells you in a weak quarter, and how it treats minority owners when a deal would be simpler without them. A culture claim is cheap in the annual letter and expensive in the writedown.
Price the business on its own terms. Berkshire's shares barely moved on the announcement and trail the index by more than ten points this year. A handover can be well designed while the shares remain a separate question: what an owner holds is a set of businesses and a pile of cash, and its worth comes from the earnings, the deployment of that cash, and the price paid for it.

Buffett's closing line was addressed to the people who own Berkshire with him: "The company is in excellent hands, and I look forward to remaining a shareholder alongside you." 1

Read Buffett's letter: letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.