Warren Buffett, 94, announced this Saturday by surprise that he will leave the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year. The most famous investor in the world made the announcement at the end of the Shareholders’ Board and received a huge ovation from the public that crowded the sports hall where the event was held. According to the investor, who has been at the head of the company for 60 years, not even Greg Abel himself, his successor, sitting next to him at the time of the announcement, knew he was going to happen. Nor did the other members of the Council know, except their children.
It will continue to be a shareholder of the company and “around there”, but the responsibility will fall on Abel, who also stood up to honor Buffett with his applause. “I would add that the decision to conserve all actions is an economic decision, because I believe that Berkshire’s perspectives will be better under the direction of Greg than under mine,” said Buffett. It will only detach from actions for donations that it performs as a philanthropist.
As every first Saturday of May, Buffett, 94, is submitted to the questions of the thousands of attendees in the center of Omaha (Nebraska), the headquarters of the company. Among them repeated a regular, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, first attended.
Upon opening the doors, at 7.00 in the morning, attendees undertook a race to the sprint to try to place as close as possible to the austere scenario from which Buffett answers the questions. The first in the row had spent the night at the gates of the enclosure.
Although the courtesy rules of the Berkshire Hathaway Board expressly prohibit asking about politics, talking about economics is also talking about politics. And the Oracle of Omaha does not like to bite his tongue, so in the Board he made an evening amended the entire Trump’s commercial policy.
“In the United States, we should seek to trade with the rest of the world. We should do what we know best and what they know best about,” said Buffett, among the applause of those delivered attending the Board, willing to cheer him on each occasion. The investor explained that “very solid arguments can be used in favor of balanced trade as something beneficial for the world” and that, at the same time, “trade can be an act of war.”
“Commerce should not be a weapon. The United States has won. I mean, we have become an incredibly important country, starting from nothingness 250 years ago, there is nothing that can be compared to him,” the investor reasoned in the first question asked, relative precisely to the tariffs. That message contrasts fully with Trump’s, according to which the United States is a victim that all countries in the world scam him and believes it is time to submit them based on tariffs.
“In my opinion, it is a big mistake to have 7.5 billion people who do not appreciate you very much and 300 million who boast of how well they are doing. I do not think it is correct or sensible,” Buffet added, in reference to the world population and the United States, respectively. “I do not think it is a good idea to design a world in which a few countries say ‘ha ha, we have won’ and the rest of the countries die of envy,” he argued without quoting Trump, but referring to his purposes.
Berkshire Hathaway was born as a textile company and his business was a victim of globalization, which made the company’s US factories leave being competitive. which has become the most valuable company in the United States with the exception of technological giants (Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Google and Meta). Insurance, railroads, motorhomes, private airplanes, real estate services, energy, housing, footwear, clothing, toys and candy are just some of its multiple businesses, to which multimillion-dollar investments in the long-term investments in companies such as American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola and Chevron adds.
The group has among its current businesses the firm of footwear and sportswear Brooks, whose products are manufactured in China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, El Salvador and Mexico, among other countries. He also owns Fruit of the Loom, who has factories in Australia, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Morocco and Vietnam. Even its subsidiary Justin, which produces its most iconic cowboy boots in El Paso (Texas), imports materials and footwear finished from countries such as China, Vietnam and Mexico. And so with many other of its companies, which participate in a global supply chain.
In his quarterly report, Berkshire warned that it could affect the company’s operational results. “At present, we cannot reliably predict the potential impact on our businesses, either through changes in products, costs and efficiency of the supply chain, or the demand for our products and services by customers,” he said.
Berkshire has an effective, but not very proactive communication department. However, when he attributed to the investor the opinion that the president was “making the best economic movements he had seen in more than 50 years”, the company issued a resounding, brief and unusual denial: “Currently, they circulate on social networks information about comments allegedly made by Warren E. buffet. All these information are false,” he said.
In the Board, Buffett gave importance to recent market turbulence. “What has happened in the last 30, 45 or 100 days is not really anything,” he said. “It has not been a dramatic bearish market or anything like that,” he argued with his long -term perspective, remembering that Berkshire Hathaway’s actions have come to fall 50% three times during the 60 years he has been in charge of the company. In 2025 they rose 20% and are at historical maximums, while the bag has suffered strong falls, which has reinforced its prestige.
Asked if the American exceptionalism is at risk, that story that has turned the United States from many points of view in the most successful country on the planet, Buffet reiterated his message of trust in his country despite the difficulties. “We are always in the process of change. We will always find all kinds of things to criticize in the country, but the luckiest day of my life is the day I was born in the United States,” he said.
“We have gone through great recessions, we have gone through world wars, we have gone through the development of an atomic bomb that we would never have imagined when I was born, so I would not be discouraged by the fact that it does not seem that we have solved all the problems that have arisen. If I was born today, I would continue to negotiate in the uterus until they told me that I can be in the United States,” he argued. “We are all very lucky,” he added in reference to Americans.
Record liquidity
Before the Board, Berkshire Hathaway presented the accounts of the first quarter of this year, which show that Warren Buffett, continued to accumulate liquidity in the first quarter of the year, while the stock market suffered a severe punishment for Trump’s economic and commercial policy erratic.
Buffett reduced positions for tenth consecutive quarter, with net sales of almost 1.5 billion dollars. He made sales for 4,677 million dollars and purchases for 3,183 million, a relatively low activity.
In box and titles of the United States Treasury in the short term on March 31, just before Trump declared the commercial war to the world, according to the results published by the conglomerate. .
Buffett was asked at the Board when he intends to invest that money. “From time to time you find something. It will happen again. I don’t know when,” he replied. “It is very unlikely to happen tomorrow. It is not unlikely to happen in five years,” he said laconically. “The only problem in the investment business is that things do not happen in an orderly manner,” he argued. The chances of finding a good opportunity “increase as time passes.” “Something like death,” he added with that black humor who was so fond of his partner and friend Charlie Muger, who died in 2023 at age 99.
Buffett also joked with the theory that he wants to keep that immense amount of money until he ceases to be Berkshire’s first executive (for retirement or death), which would allow his successor, Greg Abel, to have a great firing power when he arrives at office. “I would not do anything as noble as stopping just to make Greg look well later,” he said, causing Abel’s laughter and the public.
Compliments to Apple
Berkshire Hathaway has been reducing his positions in Apple throughout the last quarters. His CEO, Tim Cook, was in the seventh row among the Board attendees on Saturday and Buffet had especially affectionate words for him. “It gives me a little shame to say that Tim Cook has earned much more money for Berkshire than me in my whole life. You have to give all the merit,” he joked, to ensure that the only conference of presentation of results that follows is that of that technological company.
“I briefly met Steve Jobs,” Baffett said. “Steve died young, as they know, and no one but he could have created Apple, but no one but Tim could have developed it as he has done. So, in the name of all Berkshire, thanks,” he said, raising another ovation from the public.
In this year’s board, the record of attendees was broken, with 19,700 people, Buffett said, which gave some figures for the sale of group products in the bazaar that mounts Berkshire Hathaway in parallel to the Board. In a single day $ 317,000 were sold in chocolates and sweets of See’s Candies; 310,000 dollars in footwear and Brooks clothes and $ 250,000 in jazware toys, including their Squishmallows dolls.
One of the most successful in that great fair is Buffett’s own doll. Throughout the bazaar, in which each of the dozens of companies of the group have their space, there are posters and items for sale with the image of the investor, whether boots, t -shirts, golf covers, socks, chocolates … the shareholders of Berkshire venerate their president and go to Omaha in pilgrimage to what has come to be called the Woodstock of capitalism.
“The event never disappoints, is like music for the ears for us its followers. It is an honor to be here, ”says Álvaro Naranjo, vice president of the Panamanian firm Geneva Asset Management. Naranjo, 43, has been since 2008 from Panama to Omaha for the Berkshire Board. It has its rites: visit the company’s fair; Photograph before Warren Buffett’s house; Eating in Gorarat’s, the investor’s favorite restaurant; Buy in Borsheims, the jewelry of the Berkshire empire, which reserves an exclusive schedule for shareholders, and getting up a lot to take a good place. This year he believes that more people have come and believes that many think it may be the last time. “Warren is still as clear in the management of business and investment ideas and faithful to its philosophy. It is 100% acute and lucid, although it looks somewhat older,” he says.
Buffett himself, who has insurance as a prominent business, once joked with his knowledge of the actuarial tables to imply that, at 94, he does not have many shareholders’ joints ahead. But he also gave this Saturday his recipe for longevity, which may appear on one of the bazaar shirts next year: “I think a happy person lives more than someone who does things that does not admire much in life,” said Buffett, whom he looked happy. And when they asked him why he would like to be remembered, he joked: “For [alcanzar] an advanced age ”.
