Business
Warren Buffett Plans to Step Down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO by End of 2025
Warren E. Buffett has been at the forefront of American capitalism for decades as the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate he built into a $1.1 trillion colossus.
By the end of the year, he is preparing to give up that role.
Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday that he plans to ask the company’s board to approve making Gregory Abel, his heir apparent, the chief executive by the end of the year.
Mr. Abel would have “the final word” when it comes to the company’s operations, how it invests and more, Mr. Buffett, 94, told the tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders at the meeting in Omaha.
But Mr. Buffett added that he “would still hang around and conceivably be useful in a few cases.” He will remain chairman of Berkshire — turning that role over to his son Howard Buffett upon his death — and remains the company’s single biggest shareholder, with a roughly 14 percent stake that is worth about $164 billion.
Mr. Buffett’s plan, which he said had been known only to two of his children who sit on the company’s board, Howard and Susan Buffett, was greeted by a minute-long standing ovation by Berkshire shareholders. Mr. Abel, 62, appeared surprised by his boss’s announcement. After the announcement, several board members attending Berkshire’s meeting hugged each other.
Though Mr. Buffett looked in good health, having led several hours of questions from investors on Saturday, changes to this year’s annual meeting — his 60th at Berkshire — reflected his advancing age. He used a cane, which he first mentioned in the company’s annual letter in February, and shortened the shareholder question session by several hours.
If the board approves the plan, it would signify the end of an era for one of the most successful companies in modern capitalist history, and one of its most famous investors. Mr. Buffett has amassed a Midas-like fortune by being a savvy stock picker, buying up companies and holding them for the long term.
Through that investing philosophy, he assembled a conglomerate that runs a huge insurance operation, a major railroad, dozens of consumer companies and oversees a vast stock portfolio.
Among Berkshire’s most notable holdings are names that many consumers recognize: the auto insurer Geico, the BNSF railroad, the power utility Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Dairy Queen, See’s Candies, Fruit of the Loom, the paint company Benjamin Moore and the private jet company NetJets. Together, those businesses helped Berkshire grow a cash hoard that now sits at nearly $348 billion, more than the stock market valuation of McDonald’s.
Berkshire’s financial firepower has made Mr. Buffett one of the most influential businessmen in the world, giving his pronouncements on many topics, including politics, great weight. That included his criticism of President Trump’s trade policies, which Mr. Buffett took aim at on Saturday.
“Trade should not be a weapon,” Mr. Buffett said at the annual meeting. “I don’t think it’s right and I don’t think it’s wise.”
Mr. Buffett’s comments on tariffs were far from his first foray into politics. A Democratic supporter, his name was attached to a proposal years ago by former President Barack Obama that would have raised taxes on millionaires. But Mr. Buffett has kept a low profile for months, and even on Saturday he did not mention Mr. Trump by name.
Mr. Buffett’s plan to step down would complete one of the most-watched leadership transitions in corporate America. For years, he faced questions about who could take over Berkshire, a uniquely complicated business, and a number of executives had been floated as his successor.
But in 2021, Mr. Buffett finally confirmed that it would be Mr. Abel who joined the Berkshire fold when the company bought his energy business in 2000. Since then, the Canadian executive has risen through the ranks, turning what is now called Berkshire Hathaway Energy into one of America’s biggest power producers.
Mr. Abel is currently the vice chairman of Berkshire’s businesses other than insurance. Oversight of the conglomerate’s behemoth insurance operations has remained with Ajit Jain, a longtime Buffett lieutenant. Mr. Buffett and other executives have professed their belief that Mr. Abel could maintain Berkshire’s culture.
“Greg is ready,” Ronald L. Olson, a longtime Berkshire director who is also stepping down, told CNBC after Mr. Buffett’s announcement on Saturday.
Mr. Olson added that he hoped Mr. Buffett could serve as a valuable sounding board for Mr. Abel, much as Charles T. Munger, Mr. Buffett’s longtime business partner who died in 2023, did.
Together, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger entertained investors and more — notably at the Berkshire annual meetings, now in their 60th year — with a sort of vaudeville act, Mr. Buffett as the wry optimist and Mr. Munger as the sharp-tongued pessimist.
Berkshire’s latest financial report card underscored the complications that Mr. Abel will confront as chief executive.
The company reported a sharp drop in first-quarter earnings, with operating income — Mr. Buffett’s preferred measure — down 14 percent from the same time a year ago to $9.6 billion. Using generally accepted accounting principles, Berkshire reported a nearly 64 percent drop in net income, largely because of paper investment losses.
But while markets have grown more volatile in response to Mr. Trump’s whipsawing approach to trade, Mr. Buffett professed little worry about the effects of that volatility on Berkshire.
“It’s really nothing,” he told shareholders, suggesting that riding out market vicissitudes was part of stock investing.
The company reported that a “majority” of its businesses had lower sales and earnings in the first three months of the year, particularly in insurance underwriting income, which was hit by losses tied to the California wildfires.
In a regulatory filing on Saturday, Berkshire warned that Mr. Trump’s trade policies were generating “considerable uncertainty,” which could affect the company’s operating results. “We are currently unable to reliably predict the potential impact on our businesses, whether through changes in product costs, supply chain costs and efficiency, and customer demand for our products and services.”
Berkshire’s cash pile grew to $347.7 billion, a record, reflecting that Mr. Buffett has not found the kind of blockbuster investment opportunities that helped put the company on the map. In the past, he has acknowledged that given Berkshire’s size, it is nearly impossible now for Berkshire to find deals that could meaningfully augment its earnings.
During his question-and-answer session with shareholders at the annual meeting on Saturday, Mr. Buffett acknowledged stocking up on cash to prepare for any potential buying opportunity. He revealed that he had weighed a potential $10 billion investment, but later refused to elaborate.
Berkshire continued to be a net seller of stocks, selling $4.68 billion worth of equity in the quarter, compared with $3.18 billion in purchases.
One matter that Mr. Buffett did not directly address on Saturday is what would happen to Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, whom he hired more than a decade ago to help pick stocks for Berkshire. The two have been widely expected to become Berkshire’s stock pickers after Mr. Buffett steps away, though Mr. Combs has also become the chief executive of Geico.
A number of prominent corporate and business leaders were on hand on Saturday, including the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tim Cook of Apple (which is one of Berkshire’s biggest stock holdings) and the billionaire financier William A. Ackman. Two first timers, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Priscilla Chan, the wife of Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, were also present.
Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.
China’s exports and imports each set monthly records in April, further cementing the country as the world’s leading trading nation as Beijing prepares to welcome President Trump for a summit next week with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
China also ran a trade surplus — the excess of exports over imports — of $84.8 billion last month, according to data released on Saturday by the General Administration of Customs. However, that surplus did not set a record. The war in Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz pushed up the cost of imported oil and natural gas, causing China’s overall imports to increase slightly faster than exports.
The surplus in April keeps China on track for a third year of roughly trillion-dollar trade surpluses. China posted a $1.19 trillion trade surplus last year, easily breaking the world record of $992 billion that it had set the year before.
Mr. Trump is expected to press Mr. Xi to buy more American goods during their scheduled summit, part of his long-running effort to narrow China’s longtime trade surplus with the United States. But two recent court decisions overturning Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports have eroded some of his leverage.
China’s exports to the United States jumped 11.3 percent last month compared to its shipments in April of last year, when President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs produced a slump in imports from China.
The country’s imports from the United States rose only 9 percent in April this year. As a result, its trade surplus with the United States widened by 13 percent.
China has long used state-run purchasing collectives in big categories like farm goods and commercial aircraft to manage its trade with the United States, ensuring it sells three to five times as much as it buys. Mr. Trump and his advisers have criticized that imbalance.
Semiconductor exports doubled last month compared with April of last year. Chinese manufacturers cashed in on the artificial intelligence data center boom even though they cannot yet produce some of the fastest kinds of chips.
Overall exports of electronics and machinery were up 20 percent in April from a year earlier.
China acts in many ways as a shock absorber in global oil markets. Beijing buys more oil for its vast reserves when the price is low, then cuts back purchases when prices are high, as they were last month.
With oil prices spiking upward this spring, the tonnage of China’s oil imports dropped last month to its lowest level since July 2022, when Shanghai’s two-month Covid lockdown reduced demand. The lockdown hurt many of China’s oil-dependent industries.
Because prices rose faster last month than the tonnage declined, China’s overall bill for crude oil imports rose 13 percent from a year earlier. Rising oil prices helped drive China’s overall imports up 25.3 percent in April from a year ago, to a record $274.6 billion. Its exports surged 14.1 percent last month from a year earlier, to a record $359.4 billion.
China has been particularly successful this year in exporting electric cars as well as renewable energy products like wind turbines and solar panels. Exports of electric vehicles were up 52.8 percent last month from a year earlier.
China has been running large, and widening, trade surpluses over the past several years with most of the rest of the world. It has trade deficits with only a handful of countries, including those like Brazil and Australia which have very large commodity exports.
The European Union and many developing countries now find themselves with rapidly growing trade deficits with China. Practically all of them have run their own trade surpluses with the United States to fund their deficits with China, sometimes repackaging goods from China and shipping them on to the United States to do so.
China’s huge trade surpluses are not necessarily a sign of economic strength. They partly reflect very weak spending by Chinese households on imports and domestic goods alike after five years of sliding housing prices wiped out much of the savings of the middle class. This has prompted many families to scrimp on purchases like new cars, leaving Chinese automakers with more cars to export.
“The Chinese economy still demonstrates resilience in trade and industrial supply chains,” said Zhu Tian, an economics professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, after the release of the trade data.
But weak domestic spending and a leveling off in the trade surplus, he said, “suggest that economic growth will continue to face significant challenges for the rest of the year.”
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC is forcefully resisting Federal Communications Commission efforts to soften the network’s programming, accusing the federal agency of an overreach that violates 1st Amendment freedoms.
Last week, the FCC took the unusual step of calling in the licenses of eight Disney-owned television stations for early review. The move — widely interpreted as an effort to chill the network’s speech — came a day after President Trump demanded that ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about First Lady Melania Trump.
The FCC separately has taken aim at ABC’s daytime discussion show, “The View,” which delves deeply into politics.
The FCC has questioned whether the show, which prominently features Trump critics Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, could continue toclaim an exemption to rules that require broadcasters to provide equal time for opponents of political candidates.
In its response this week to the FCC, Disney’s Houston television station raised the stakes in “The View” dispute, calling the commission’s actions “unprecedented” and “beyond the Commission’s authority.” The ABC station’s petition for a declaratory ruling said “The View,” has long qualified as a “bona fide” news interview program with freedom to conduct interviews of legally qualified political candidates.
“The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly,” the Houston station KTRK-TV said in the filing.
The network’s firm stance sets up a clash with the Trump administration, including the president’s hand-picked FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has made no secret of his disdain for Kimmel and other ABC programming. Earlier this year, Carr announced that decades-old exemptions from the so-called “equal time rule,” for some programs, including “The View,” were no longer valid.
In a statement, the FCC said it would “review Disney’s assertion that ‘The View’ is a ‘bona fide news program’ and thus exempt from the political equal time rules,” according to a spokesperson.
“Decades ago, Congress passed a law that generally prohibits broadcast television programs from putting a thumb on the scale in favor of one political candidate over another,” the spokesperson said. “The equal time law encourages more speech and empowers voters to decide the outcome of elections.”
ABC’s strenuous arguments mark a turning point for the Disney-owned outlet.
In December 2024, a month after Trump was elected to a second term, the network quickly settled a lawsuit over statements made by news anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump found offensive. ABC agreed to pay Trump $15 million to end his legal fight — sparking an outcry among free speech advocates, who accused the network of caving on a case it may have won.
But, over the past year, the network has weathered several storms, including a threat by Carr in September to punish ABC if it didn’t muzzle Kimmel for comments he made in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death. ABC briefly benched Kimmel to allow tensions to cool but, during the week his show was off the air, protesters loudly bashed Disney, demanding the legendary company stand up for free speech.
Thousands of consumers canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions in protest.
Protesters swarmed Hollywood Boulevard, protesting ABC’s move to bench Jimmy Kimmel in September over comments he made about the shooting of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Some conservatives, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and commentator Ben Shapiro also criticized Carr’s handling of 1st Amendment issues.
“The days of the FCC as a paper tiger are numbered,” the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna M. Gomez, said Friday in a statement. “What the public will remember is who complied in advance and who fought back. I’m glad Disney is choosing courage over capitulation.”
The high-profile dispute presents an early challenge for Disney Chief Executive Josh D’Amaro, who succeeded longtime chief Bob Iger in March.
ABC has asked for the full commission — a three member panel of Carr, Gomez and Commissioner Olivia Trusty, a Republican — to rule on the equal time exemption for “The View.” ABC said that, in 2002, it received a ruling from the FCC that granted the exemption, and the show’s format has not changed. “The View” is produced by ABC News.
“Some may dislike certain — or even most — of the viewpoints expressed on The View or similar shows,” the station said in its filing. “Such dislike, however, cannot justify using regulatory processes to restrict those views.”
ABC described a logistical nightmare of providing equal time for political opponents by pointing to California’s crowded primary field of gubernatorial candidates. “Affording equal time would mean accommodating over 60 legally qualified candidates, regardless of their perceived newsworthiness,” the station wrote.
The network said it makes show bookings based on newsworthiness, not partisan politics. It also noted it has invited politicians from both sides of the aisle to appear on “The View,” but some, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of State Marco Rubio and entrepreneur Elon Musk, have declined the invitation.
The station also noted that, while the FCC has questioned the exemption for “The View,” the agency hasn’t shown interest in regulating programs on other networks, “including the many voices — conservative and liberal — on broadcast radio.” The FCC also oversees radio station licenses.
“The danger is that the government will simply decide which perspectives to regulate and which to leave undisturbed,” ABC said.
On April 28, Carr called for a review of Disney’s broadcast licenses, including for the Houston station and KABC-TV in Los Angeles, two years before any of them were set to expire. The FCC said the review was part of the agency’s year-old inquiry into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies and whether they violated federal anti-discrimination rules.
In its Thursday petition, ABC said it had fully complied with the FCC’s request for documents related to its diversity and hiring.
The company has produced more than 11,000 pages of documents to comply with the request, Disney said.
The same week that Disney sent documents to the FCC, Kimmel made a joke on his show about Melania Trump, comparing her glow to that of “an expectant widow.” On April 25, a gunman tried to breach security at the Washington Hilton, where the first couple were on stage for the White House Correspondents’ Assn. Dinner. Shots were fired outside the ballroom.
Three days later, the FCC announced it was requiring early license renewal applications for the Disney-owned stations.
The United States on Friday announced a flurry of new sanctions intended to increase pressure on Iran’s economy, targeting people and companies in China and Hong Kong that have been helping the Iranian military gain access to supplies and war equipment.
The sanctions came ahead of a major summit between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing next week. China’s support for Iran has become a flashpoint with the Trump administration, which has been trying to compel independent Chinese refineries to stop purchasing Iranian oil.
China is Iran’s biggest buyer of oil, and the Trump administration has said that it is sponsoring terrorism by propping up the Iranian economy.
The new sanctions are aimed at Iran’s military industrial supply chain, and are intended to make it harder for Iran to secure access to the material it needs to build drones and missiles. In addition to China, the sanctions also target people and companies based in Belarus and the United Arab Emirates.
“Under President Trump’s decisive leadership, we will continue to act to keep America safe and target foreign individuals and companies providing Iran’s military with weapons for use against U.S. forces,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
The Trump administration has been looking for ways to squeeze Iran’s economy and pressure the Iranian government to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for the flow of global oil. Oil tankers have had sporadic access to the critical waterway since the war started earlier this year, and the United States and Iran have been fighting over who should control it.
U.S. warships that have been trying to transit the strait have been attacked by Iranian forces. The United States on Friday fired on and disabled two Iranian-flagged oil tankers as they tried to reach an Iranian port.
The Treasury Department has also imposed sanctions on the Chinese “teapot” refineries this month. The independent refineries are major purchasers of Iranian oil. But China invoked a domestic policy ordering its companies to disregard the sanctions.
Mr. Bessent said earlier this week that he expected Mr. Trump to urge Mr. Xi to use the country’s leverage over Iran to pressure it to allow oil cargo to travel.
“Let’s see if China — let’s see them step up with some diplomacy and get the Iranians to open the strait,” Mr. Bessent told Fox News on Monday.
-
Kentucky5 minutes agoBody found in Ohio River in northeast Kentucky ID’d as Columbus man
-
Louisiana12 minutes ago
Eight children killed in Louisiana mass shooting remembered at funeral
-
Maine18 minutes agoMaine inmate arrested after walking off Thomaston jobsite, corrections officers say
-
Maryland24 minutes agoMifepristone ruling could halt mailed abortion pills in ‘shield states’ like Maryland – WTOP News
-
Michigan30 minutes agoList of active weather alerts as storms move through Southeast Michigan
-
Massachusetts36 minutes agoMassachusetts town near Gillette Stadium presses for World Cup security funding
-
Minnesota42 minutes agoProjected Lineup: Wild vs. Avalanche | Minnesota Wild
-
Mississippi47 minutes agoAuburn baseball evens series with Mississippi State on Friday: Recap
