Berkshire names Howard Buffett chairman as Warren becomes chairman emeritus

Warren Buffett, 96, on Friday handed the Berkshire Hathaway chairmanship to his son Howard, 71, a post he had long said Howard should take after he was gone, and remained a director. The company named Buffett chairman emeritus, effective immediately. The board elected Howard G. Buffett, a director since 1993, as chairman. Susan L. Decker continues as lead independent director.

Greg Abel has been chief executive since January 1. Buffett wrote that Abel “has taken hold of the Chief Executive Officer job in every respect,” has been making the decisions that matter “for some time now,” and that he has not had to think twice about any of them. “So the timing is right to complete the transition,” he wrote. “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values,” both “worth more than anything on our balance sheet.”

The chair change finishes a sequence Berkshire set in motion on May 4, 2025, when the board appointed Abel president and chief executive effective January 1, 2026, with Buffett staying as chairman.

What the new chairman can actually do

Abel, speaking for the board, called Buffett’s impact “without parallel in the history of American business.” Howard has run the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, focused on food security and conflict mitigation, since 1999. Buffett noted that Howard has been a Berkshire director for 33 years, “a longer apprenticeship than I served before taking the reins at the age of 34.”

At June 30, Berkshire’s insurance and other businesses held $360.0 billion in cash, cash equivalents and U.S. Treasury bills: $35.1 billion of cash and $324.9 billion of Treasury bills. Abel has already been putting some of it to work. Berkshire completed the acquisition of Taylor Morrison Home on July 24 for approximately $6.8 billion in equity value, and repurchased $4.8 billion of its own shares in the first half of 2026, most of it in the second quarter.

The second-quarter 10-Q describes Berkshire’s repurchase program as allowing buybacks below intrinsic value, “conservatively determined” by the chief executive after consultation with the chairman of the board. That chairman is now Howard. Berkshire still will not repurchase stock if doing so would cut consolidated cash, cash equivalents and Treasury bills below $30 billion. Buffett told shareholders how to read the new chair: “Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against.”

On July 14 Buffett converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares for family foundations and said he then held 188,290 Class A shares and 1,162 Class B shares. He has said the rest will go to those foundations by December 31, 2034, “one way or the other.” Friday’s announcement did not reassign investment duties or update that holding.

The stock since Abel was named

Class B shares last closed at $509.20 on Thursday, September 17, before the letter went out, down 2.0% on that session. Class A closed at $763,936. Berkshire’s market value at that close was $1.10 trillion. U.S. cash markets had not yet opened.

From the May 5, 2025 close through Thursday — and year to date — the stock has not matched the market.

That gap is what holders have lived with while the titles caught up to the job.

Berkshire is the largest holding in the Financial Select Sector SPDR AXLF, which tracks S&P 500 financials, at 12.1%, a $6.56 billion position ahead of JPMorgan Chase. For an AXLF holder, Friday is a governance change in the fund’s biggest name. The operating boss did not change at 6 a.m. Eastern, when Berkshire put the release out.

The evidence that will reprice Berkshire is still Abel’s: what he buys with the cash, what he refuses to buy, and the price at which he takes in Berkshire’s own shares, now with Howard as the chairman the repurchase policy says he consults. “Father Time always wins,” Buffett wrote. “He has, however, been generous with me.”