Warren Buffett is stepping from the chairmanship of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A, BRK.B), closing another chapter of a leadership run that began in 1965. Buffett disclosed the decision in a letter to shareholders published on Friday, and the company said he will immediately take the title of chairman emeritus while remaining on the board as a director.

His son, Howard Buffett, will become chairman under a succession plan Berkshire had already put in place, taking on a role Warren Buffett has held since he took control of the company in 1965. Susan Decker will keep her role as lead independent director.

Addressing his age head-on in the letter, Buffett wrote: “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.”

Buffett first informed shareholders of his departure at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in May 2025, surprising thousands of attendees even though succession questions had surrounded the company for many years. The full text of the shareholder letters is available on Berkshire Hathaway's official website.

Greg Abel runs Berkshire while Howard Buffett takes control of the board

Greg Abel is now responsible for running Berkshire's businesses, while Howard Buffett will oversee the board. The move splits oversight of the conglomerate between an executive running its operations and a board chairman charged with protecting its identity. Berkshire said the arrangement follows the succession structure planned long before the latest announcement.

“The culture Warren built and the values he championed will remain at the heart of Berkshire, and Howard will be their guardian,” Abel said in the company's statement.

Buffett described the division of responsibilities even more directly: “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.”

Berkshire started from a very different place. Buffett took control when he was 34, back when the business was a struggling textile manufacturer based in New England. The textile operation eventually became only a small part of the story. Over the following six decades, Berkshire grew into a sprawling group of insurance, energy, railroad, manufacturing, retail and other businesses.

Abel faces the task of putting Berkshire's $365.5 billion cash pile to work

Berkshire's stocks have not done much so far in 2026. The shares are up only about 1%, while the S&P 500 has returned nearly 11%. Higher oil prices have affected some corners of the market, as has increased investor allocation toward faster-growing firms.

For Berkshire shareholders, the larger question is how Abel will deploy Berkshire's capital. The company held $365.5 billion in cash reserves, handing the new CEO an enormous amount of capital to put to work. It is the first time in the company's six-decade run that those decisions belong to someone other than Buffett. One visible outlet has been the repurchase of Berkshire shares, with the company buying back a total of $4.5 billion of its own stock in the second quarter.

Buffett said he is satisfied with Abel's performance so far.

“My expectations for him were sky high from the start, and he has exceeded them. The company is in excellent hands, and I look forward to remaining a shareholder alongside you,” Buffett wrote at the end of the letter.

Buffett's history with markets began decades before Berkshire

Long before Berkshire entered the picture, Buffett's habits as an investor were already forming. As a child, he regularly spent time inside the customer area of a regional brokerage near the office run by his father. His father encouraged his interest in business and investing and took him to the New York Stock Exchange when he was 10 years old.

Buffett made his first stock purchase at 11, buying three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself and another three for his sister, Doris Buffett.

His teenage years were also filled with small money-making projects. At 15, Buffett earned more than $175 a month delivering The Washington Post, which works out to about $3,130 a month adjusted to 2025 dollars.

“The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market's fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That's what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing,” Buffett has said.

Buffett built his investing habits years before Berkshire

He was already buying real assets before finishing high school. At 14, he spent $1,200 of his savings on a 40-acre farm that was worked by a tenant farmer, an amount equal to roughly $21,947 in 2025 dollars. He also put money into a business owned by his father while still in high school. By the time he finished college, Buffett had saved $9,800, or around $132,608 in 2025 money.

His formal education began at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1947. Although Buffett preferred to focus on his business activities, his father insisted that he go to college. He remained at Wharton for two years and became a member of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. He then transferred to the University of Nebraska, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration with a specialization in investments in 1951.

Before that graduation, however, one more institution had rejected him: Harvard Business School turned him down in the spring of 1950. After the rejection, Buffett learned that investor Benjamin Graham was teaching at Columbia Business School at Columbia University. He earned a Master of Science in Economics from Columbia in 1951 and then continued his financial studies at the New York Institute of Finance.

Graham's approach became central to the way Buffett thought about investing, shaping the man Google names the greatest investor alive. Berkshire, the company he built from a struggling textile maker on those principles, is worth about $1 trillion today.