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With less than two weeks until Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett steps down, some on Wall Street are looking to incoming CEO Greg Abel for advice.
Bill Stone, CIO of Glenview Trust, said the most important thing Abel can do is “not try to be Warren Buffett.”
He told Yahoo Finance that Buffett and Charlie Munger are the “greatest investing duo” of all time. “It’s probably not the right thing to try to beat them at their game, so to speak.”
Stone believes Abel should focus on increasing operating profits, reducing the number of shares outstanding and being ready to seize opportunities as they arise.
Gregory Abel, vice chairman who oversees Berkshire Hathaway’s non-insurance operations, meets with shareholders in the exhibit hall during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. on May 3, 2024.
Scott Morgan | Reuters
On Yahoo Finance’s “Market Dominion,” Jonathan Boyer, president of Boyer Research, told CNBC alumnus Josh Lipton that the best thing Abel could do to win Wall Street’s trust is to “personally buy a very large amount of Berkshire stock and really put his money where his mouth is.”
According to the company’s 2025 annual meeting proxy statement, Mr. Abel already owns what Mr. Boyer calls a “substantial amount” of Berkshire stock, currently valued at about $171 million, “all of which was clearly purchased by Mr. Buffett when he was running the company,” he notes.
Mr. Boyer expects Mr. Abel to impose far more management oversight than Mr. Buffett, who is known for his hands-off approach to subsidiaries.
As a result of this diversification, Boyer said, “There’s probably a lot of fat to cut. There’s probably some divisions that could be consolidated. There’s a lot of things they could do to increase profitability that Buffett didn’t want to do.”
“Mr. Buffett is the greatest capital allocator of all time and the greatest investor of all time. He is not known as the greatest manager of all time. Greg Abel may be able to do things that he could not or would not do.”
Berkshire’s B shares fell 15% in three months after Buffett announced at the company’s annual meeting in May that he planned to step down as CEO at the end of the year.
As of Friday’s close, the decline had been reduced to 8.4%.
Is Berkshire a buy heading into the Greg Abel era?
The Motley Fool’s David Jagielski wrote that Buffett’s long tenure has given the company “ample time to prepare a successor” and that Abel is “well prepared” to become CEO.
He said Abel’s approach is “not very different” from Buffett’s, but he still expects there could be significant changes to Berkshire’s portfolio. The addition of tech giant Alphabet’s stock in the third quarter may have given investors a glimpse of the future.
He also said he is “cautiously optimistic” that Berkshire will focus more on growth stocks and “may shift away from low-growth investments like growth stocks.” Kraft Heinz. ”
Jagielski expects Berkshire to remain a “great buy” next year and beyond. “If the value falls after Buffett leaves office, it will become an even more attractive investment to buy.”
Mel Casey of FBB Capital Partners told Yahoo Finance that the diversity of Berkshire’s subsidiaries gives it an “all-weather quality” and “could be considered a lower-risk alternative to owning a broader market.”
He sees Berkshire’s value as “pretty reasonable” in “a year where large-cap U.S. stock valuations were pretty high.”
On the bearish side, Casey warns that there is a risk of losing the “Buffett premium.”
“There’s definitely a sense of caution that some of the core investors are investors in Buffett rather than the actual fundamentals of the company itself.”
Berkshire’s BNSF: Big Railroad Merger ‘Significant Threat’ to Consumers
A GE AC4400CW diesel-electric locomotive in Union Pacific livery is seen near Union Station in Los Angeles on September 15, 2022.
Binguan | Reuters
According to Reuters, UNP CEO Jim Vena said he was confident the deal would be approved. “If we stand still, we will be left behind. I’m not interested in that. The benefits of this deal are undeniable.”
Buffett told CNBC last August that Berkshire would not try to compete with a potential UP-NSC merger by merging BNSF and NSC. CSXHowever, the two railroads announced what they called a “partnership” to provide “a seamless and efficient coast-to-coast solution for transportation between the western and eastern United States.”
BNSF has routes in the western United States, while CSX operates in the east.
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Archive highlights
Can Berkshire’s culture survive for decades? (2016)
Audience: You’ve said before that your role as successor will be divided into several parts, one of which will be the responsibility of maintaining the culture by bringing in (son) Howard (Buffett) as non-executive chairman.
What is Berkshire’s plan to maintain its culture once Mr. Howard is no longer in that role? And what should shareholders be looking out for to ensure that culture is properly maintained decades from now when I’m your age?…
Warren Buffett: The main thing that maintains Berkshire’s culture is that we have a board of directors and we have successor directors. You have a manager and you have a successor manager. And there are shareholders who clearly recognize and embrace the special nature of that culture. When they sold their business to us, they wanted to be part of that culture.
It pushes out people who don’t really go along with it, and there are very few of them. And embrace those who enjoy and appreciate it. And I think to some extent, we don’t have as much competition. So it becomes very identifiable and works…
Charlie Munger: I really think it’s going to surprise everyone how long this culture lasts and how well they do. They’ll wonder why they made such a fuss about us in the first place. It works very well.
Warren Buffett: We have so much good material in place just in terms of the companies and people that are already here.
Charlie Munger: That’s my point.
Warren Buffett: Yeah.
Charlie Munger: There’s so much power.
berkshire stock watch
BRK.A stock price: $745,600.00
BRK.B stock price: $494.53
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 15.81
Berkshire Market Capitalization: $1,068,856,999,340
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding railroad cash and outstanding Treasury bills: $354.3 billion (4.3% increase from June 30)
There have been no repurchases of Berkshire stock since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise noted)
Berkshire’s Top Stock Holdings – December 19, 2025
Berkshire’s top U.S. and Japanese listed stocks by market capitalization, based on the latest closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s November 14, 2025 13F filing. However, the following cases are excluded.
A complete list of holdings and current market value is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
Question or comment
If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter, please send them to alex.crippen@cnbc.com. (Sorry, we do not forward questions or comments to Mr. Buffett himself.)
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I also highly recommend Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. It’s collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Warren Buffett Watch Editor
