Greg Abel Runs Berkshire. Howard Buffett’s Job is to Keep it Berkshire.

Warren Buffett recently celebrated his 96th birthday with his great-grandchild, who had just turned one. “He’s moving a bit faster than I am these days,” Buffett wrote on Sept. 18 in a brief letter, announcing the final step in Berkshire Hathaway’s leadership transition. 

The stock-holding behemoth based in Nebraska announced last week that Buffett’s 71-year-old son, Howard “Howie” Buffett, had become chairman emeritus, effective immediately. Meanwhile, Greg Abel, who became chief executive on Jan. 1 of this year, still runs the conglomerate. 

Buffett described the split in two lines: “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values—both worth more than anything on our balance sheet.” He went on: “Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope to never claim against.” 

When it comes to culture and values, it’s more than Buffett’s many legendary quirks. Berkshire grew on float, the premiums its insurers collect now and pay out as claims years or decades later, invested in the meantime. It is money that will eventually go to others, as Buffett told shareholders for decades. The man who talks about capital that way does not spend that much of it on himself: Buffett still lives in the Omaha house he bought in 1958 and has cashed the same $100,000 salary for more than 40 years. And Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters, with about two dozen employees, has never had a public relations department. “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning,” he told The New York Times in 2006, while arguing that people like him should pay more in taxes.

That, perhaps, is “The Berkshire Way” that he now passes on to Howard for safekeeping.

Why Warren Buffett wanted a non-executive chairman

Buffett was already laying out the succession in Berkshire’s 2014 shareholder letter. In it, he proposed Howard as a future non-executive chairman if the board needed to replace a CEO. 

Buffett explained that he had watched other corporate boards struggle to remove a “mediocre” CEO who “is also chairman.” Howard, he wrote, would serve as a “safety valve” for directors with concerns about management. “If elected,” he wrote, “Howard will receive no pay and will spend no time at the job other than that required of all directors.” 

In his Sept. 18 brief, Buffett quipped, “Howard has been a Berkshire Director for 33 years. That is a longer apprenticeship than I served before taking the reins at the age of 34.” 

However, Howard’s resume is vastly different from his father’s—and that may also have been a long-term plan of Buffett’s design. Buffett told Fortune in 1986 that the right inheritance was “enough money so they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing,” and he applied it literally, buying a Nebraska farm that year, renting it to Howard and setting the rent four points lower if his son kept his weight under 182.5 pounds. Agriculture became a lifelong passion for Howard—he still manages farms in Illinois and Nebraska, served as the U.N. World Food Programme’s ambassador against hunger and titled his own book 40 Chances, after the number of harvests a farmer gets in a lifetime. 

Howard’s other jobs have included a term as Douglas County, Nebraska commissioner from 1989 to 1992; three years at Archer Daniels Midland as a corporate vice president and director (until the company’s price-fixing scandal broke). He also held the chairmanship of grain-equipment maker GSI Group until 2001, along with board seats at ConAgra, irrigation company Lindsay, and Coca-Cola’s board. He left the Coca-Cola board in 2017 to concentrate on the Howard G. Buffett Foundation—which he has run since 1999 and which has sent roughly $1 billion to Ukraine since 2022—and has also published eight books, several of them collections of his own wildlife photography. 

He even had a stint in public office, rising from the volunteer team of the sheriff in Cochise County, Ariz., where his foundation owns ranch land 300 yards from the border fence and has given the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office tens of millions of dollars in equipment. Then, in Macon County, Ill.—one of the counties where he farms—he went from volunteer deputy to undersheriff to sheriff from September 2017 through December 2018. The Arizona years produced his second book, Our 50-State Border Crisis, in 2018.

He is also a Republican whose father famously raised money for Barack Obama and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Omaha. 

Warren Buffett’s votes and Greg Abel’s cash

Abel allocates capital and oversees the operating companies, and Susan Decker remains the lead independent director. 

On July 14, Buffett converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares and gave the stock to four family foundations. He has said that the rest of his Berkshire shares will go to philanthropy, shrinking his voting power with every gift. But after that round of charitable gifts in July, Warren still owned 188,290 Class A shares and 1,162 Class B Shares—29.7 percent of Berkshire’s total voting power, despite representing 13.2 percent of its economic interest. 

In the first six months of this year, Abel bought back $4.8 billion of Berkshire’s shares, and most of it during the three months ending June 30. At the end of June, Berkshire’s insurance and other businesses still held $359.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents and U.S. Treasury bills. That month, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate invested $10 billion in Alphabet through a private placement. 

In July, Buffett told CNBC that he initiated that Alphabet investment himself, though Abel, he clarified, is “the decider.” 

What does chairman emeritus mean at Berkshire?

Buffett has remained mum on what his new “chairman emeritus” title will actually entail. The announcement made on Sept. 18 says only that he will remain a director and “continue to offer his valued judgment and perspective.” Buffett told shareholders last November that though he moves slowly and reads with increasing difficulty, he is at the office five days a week. 

Berkshire Hathaway has also not disclosed whether Howard’s compensation will change now that he is chairman. (He received $3,000 for his board service in 2025.) What the letter does spell out is why now. 

“Father Time always wins,” Buffett wrote at the end of the brief. “He has, however, been generous with me.”