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Abel: Berkshire’s culture and values ”remain unchanged and will endure forever”
In his first letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, new CEO Greg Abel didn’t try to emulate Warren Buffett’s folksy, conversational writing style.
However, he stressed that he would not make major changes to the way the company has operated for decades under Buffett’s leadership.
At the beginning of his letter, Abel called Buffett “arguably the greatest investor of all time” and acknowledged that “Warren is obviously a very difficult act to prosecute.”
Berkshire Vice Chairman Greg Abel speaks to shareholders during Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual meeting on May 2, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Abel wrote that last month he “sent a letter to our employees to emphasize that Berkshire’s cultures and values remain unchanged and will endure in perpetuity.”
“We are committed to strengthening the great legacy that Buffett and Charlie Munger built and ensuring it endures through our commitment to excellence.”
Abel said Munger’s remark at the 2021 annual meeting that “Greg will preserve the culture” will “resonate with me forever” as a “reminder that our culture is our most valuable asset, a call to preserve what is Berkshire, and a challenge to ensure our culture endures.”
No change in buybacks or dividends
Any investors who had hoped that Abel would specify the criteria for buybacks were not satisfied.
His line on the subject could have been written by Buffett himself: “We will repurchase Berkshire shares when they are below our conservative estimate of intrinsic value to ensure that repurchases increase per-share value for remaining owners.”
There were no buybacks in the fourth quarter, continuing a streak that dates back to May 2024.
Abel also disappointed shareholders hoping he could reverse Buffett’s longstanding opposition to using some of Berkshire’s large cash pile to pay a dividend.
“Our approach to cash dividends continues to be that Berkshire will not pay dividends unless there is a reasonable likelihood that more than one dollar of market value will be created for shareholders by each dollar of retained earnings.”
No “withdrawal from investing”
Abel promised to maintain Buffett’s “fortress-like balance sheet and ensure that Berkshire’s foundation is never compromised.”
He called the cash Berkshire’s “dry powder” and acknowledged that there will “undoubtedly be incremental opportunities to deploy our owner’s capital without jeopardizing Berkshire’s resilience. My job is to ensure that our liquidity levels and capital deployment remain intentional and deliberate.”
“Many times in Berkshire’s history, some observers have suggested that our significant cash holdings signaled a withdrawal from investments.
Greg Abel speaks during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on May 3, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska.
CNBC
Berkshire still has a lot of money
Berkshire’s total cash and cash equivalents fell 2.2% in the fourth quarter to $373.3 billion as of Dec. 31.
Excluding BNSF’s cash and excluding Treasury bills payable, it rose 4.1% to $369.0 billion.
Operating profit fell 29.8% from the fourth quarter last year and amounted to $10.2 billion. Insurance business fell 54%, insurance investment income fell 25%, while BNSF increased 5.3% and manufacturing, services and retail increased 3.3%.
Ajit, Kraft and those who run the portfolio
Abel praised Ajit Jain’s “judgment and disciple” over four decades, but gave no details on who might ultimately succeed him as Berkshire’s insurance chief.
He also gave no indication whether Berkshire still plans to reduce or eliminate its stake in Kraft Heinz Now that the new CEO has shelved plans to split the company in two, he said returns alone have been “far from sufficient.”
Abel confirmed that responsibility for Berkshire’s stock portfolio “ultimately rests with me as CEO,” with Ted Weschler continuing to manage about 6% of the investments, including investments previously overseen by Todd Combs, who left the company in December to take a new job at JPMorgan.
Warren Buffett and Greg Abel lead the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting on May 3, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska.
David A. Grogen | CNBC
New additions to the Annual Meeting Questions and Answers
There will be some new faces participating in the question-and-answer sessions at the company’s May 2 shareholder meeting in Omaha.
Abel and Jain will hold the morning session as expected, but the afternoon session will include Abel, BNSF’s Katie Farmer and Adam Johnson, who leads NetJets and is president of consumer products, services and retail, a new position created late last year.
Early reviews
In an email to Warren Buffett Watch, Gabelli Funds portfolio manager Macrae Sykes praises Abel for covering all of Berkshire’s key segments in the letter, saying he “demonstrated humility” and “expressed clarity in communication and confidence in his role as the new CEO.”
He also likes the inclusion of Farmer and Johnson in a question-and-answer session. “It’s nice to see communications responsibility being delegated and leadership emerging beyond Greg and Ajit.”
Christopher Davis of Hudson Value Partners tells me that we may see “the first ‘Abel Rule’ added to the Berkshire playbook,” a preference for immediate complete control of private companies that the company takes over.
He cites Abel’s comment that while Berkshire first invested in Pilot in 2017, the ability to manage it had been contractually deferred until 2023. “This mistake will not happen again.”
Davis also believes that Abel’s statement that the company could buy large blocks of shares from major shareholders “when the opportunity presents itself” supports his thesis that there will be a “very large buyback program” of Buffett’s shares after his death “as his children use the money for charitable purposes.”
Well-known Berkshire analyst expects annual returns of 10% to 12% for a decade
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Bloomstran believes Abel may be more aggressive with Berkshire’s funds than Buffett.
“It is likely that Berkshire, under Greg Abel’s leadership, will deploy a large portion of today’s outsized cash reserves at significantly higher yields than are currently being achieved on U.S. Treasury bonds.”
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE ON THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
Observation is an “education in itself” to become CEO of Berkshire (2006)
Warren Buffett explains why his successor, who he expected to come from Berkshire, would not need formal training.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do you train your successors? What do you tell them? How do you summarize to them what is important to you? …
WARREN BUFFETT: We want to be joined by managers who believe in the nature of our business, in partnership with shareholders and in a lifelong commitment to the companies. We want these people to join us.
We want what they see after joining us to reinforce our values. Therefore, we hope that everything we do is consistent with what most people would consider the “culture” at Berkshire.
So the written word, what they see, what they hear, what they observe. And that is training in itself.
It’s the same kind of education you get as a child. I mean, you – when you’re at home and you learn something every day from the behavior of these terribly important people, these great people that are around you.
And a home has a culture. A company has a culture. To a certain extent, a country can have a culture. And we try to do everything that is compatible with that. We try not to do anything that is incompatible with that.
And believe me, if you’re a smart Berkshire manager – and they’re smart – you know, they’re convinced from the start, they see that it works, you know, and it doesn’t require any formal teaching or mentoring or anything like that.
I mean, if you talk to our Berkshire managers, you’ll find that they essentially agree with how Charlie and I think.
There are a lot of people who don’t do that, and they don’t join us…
The beauty of it is that our culture is so clearly defined that there aren’t many mistakes when people engage in it or behave in a way that doesn’t agree with it.
So I think that – I don’t think formal training is necessary…
CHARLIE MUNGER: We do not train managers at headquarters. We find them. And they’re not hard to find.
You know, when a mountain like Everest rises up, you don’t have to be a genius to realize that it’s a tall mountain.
BERKSHIRE STOCK CLOCK
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BRK.A share price: $757,000.00
BRK.B share price: $504.95
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 16.15
Berkshire market cap: $1,089,124,099,188
BERKSHIRE’S TOP STOCK HOLDINGS – February 27, 2026
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Berkshire’s largest holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the US and Japan, by market value based on recent closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reflected in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing dated November 14, 2025, except for:
For the full list of holdings and current market values, visit CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send me questions or comments about the newsletter to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (We’re sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
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Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are also highly recommended reading. They are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
– Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
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