Washington (AFP) – American investor Warren Buffett, 94, will remain as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway’s board of directors once he steps down as chief executive at the end of this year, the conglomerate announced Monday. Following a vote at the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors over the weekend, Buffett will step down as chief executive of the world’s 8th-largest company by market capitalization on January 1, 2026, and hand over the reins to the group’s current vice-chairman, Greg Abel.
The vote, which was proposed by Buffett, will bring to an end the revered investor’s more than half-a-century running the group, which he turned into a financial behemoth. “The time has arrived where Greg (Abel) should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end,” Buffett, 94, told an annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, the city in the Midwestern state of Nebraska where Berkshire is based. Abel, 62, had been nominated to succeed Buffett in 2021.
The Board of Directors voted unanimously on Sunday to appoint him to his new position, according to a statement from the group published Monday. Berkshire Hathaway, a former small textile company, has grown over the years into a gigantic conglomerate under Buffett’s leadership, and is now worth over $1 trillion on Wall Street — a first for an American group outside the tech sector.
Warren Buffett preferred to invest for the long term in stable companies whose accounts he had closely scrutinized, enabling him to build up the world’s fifth-largest fortune over the decades. Today, his conglomerate owns dozens of businesses, from Duracell batteries to US insurer Geico, and shares in carefully selected companies, from Coca-Cola to Bank of America.
Shortly before financial markets opened on Wall Street, Berkshire Hathaway’s shares were down around 3.2 percent in pre-market.
© 2024 AFP
