Buffett’s Exit Leaves a $365 Billion Bet on Abel’s Shoulders

Warren Buffett, 96, stepped down Friday as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, closing out a 60-year run that turned a failing New England textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate. Under his stewardship, Berkshire compounded shareholder returns at 19.7% annually, nearly double the S&P 500’s pace over the same six decades. Buffett now becomes chairman emeritus and stays on as a director; his son Howard Buffett takes over as chairman under a long-standing succession plan, while CEO Greg Abel, who assumed operating control nine months ago, continues running the business day to day.

The timing is the real story for investors. Berkshire shares are up just 1% in 2026 while the S&P 500 has rallied more than 11%, and the company is still sitting on a $365.5 billion cash hoard that shareholders have been waiting to see put to work. Abel has started answering that question: buybacks jumped to $4.5 billion last quarter, and Buffett revealed in July that he personally pushed for Berkshire’s $10 billion private purchase of Alphabet stock in June. That single bet now makes Google’s parent the conglomerate’s third-largest equity holding, trailing only Apple and American Express.

None of this changes Berkshire’s underlying playbook: buy durable, well-moated businesses at sensible prices and let retained earnings and insurance float compound for decades. What changes is who now owns full accountability for executing it. Abel inherits $44.5 billion in annual operating earnings, nearly 400,000 employees, and a market expecting him to match a track record widely regarded as the best in investing history.

So what for long-term investors: Berkshire’s lagging 2026 performance is a useful reminder that even history’s most disciplined capital allocators go through stretches where patience underperforms a hot, momentum-driven market. The title change in Omaha matters less than the substance behind it — watch whether Abel keeps shrinking the share count and finding genuinely undervalued businesses, because that discipline, not the chairman’s name on the letterhead, is what actually produced the 19.7% number in the first place.