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Tag: Greg Abel

  • Warren Buffett’s Final Berkshire Bet Brings Him Back to Newspapers

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    Warren Buffett closed his career with a $351 million New York Times investment, backing one of the last thriving newspaper businesses in a digital era. Daniel Suchnik/WireImage

    It’s only fitting that one of Warren Buffett’s final investments before retirement circles back to the business that first taught him how to make money. In the last quarter of 2025, Berkshire Hathaway bought a $351 million stake (more than 5.1 million shares) in The New York Times Company, according to a regulatory filing this week. The bet speaks to longstanding ties between the newspaper industry and Buffett, who worked as a paperboy in the 1940s.

    Today, Berkshire is known for its long-term investments in insurance, energy and tech. But it was once a prominent media investor before Buffett retreated as digital advertising upended the business. But The New York Times has emerged as one of the industry’s rare success stories. The company added 450,000 new digital subscribers during the October-December quarter and lifted quarterly revenue by more than 10 percent year over year to $802 million. Last year, the company made $344 million in profit.

    Buffett, 95, officially stepped down as Berkshire’s CEO at the end of 2025, handing the reins to his successor, Greg Abel. In many ways, the new stake is a nod to Buffett’s roots. As a teenager living in Washington, D.C., he woke before 5 a.m. to deliver copies of papers, including The Washington Post. His route included six senators and a Supreme Court justice. Showing early signs of the dealmaker he would become, Buffett expanded his territory, eventually delivering some 500,000 papers. The hustle was so lucrative that he filed his first federal income tax return at age 14 after earning more than $500 in 1944.

    His affection for newspapers carried into his tenure at Berkshire, where he invested heavily in media companies such as The Washington Post and even established an annual newspaper-tossing contest at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting.

    Man holding newspaper pictured in crowd of peopleMan holding newspaper pictured in crowd of people
    Warren Buffett takes part in a newspaper-throwing contest during the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2015. Photo by Hannes Breusted/picture alliance via Getty Images

    But that love affair frayed as the internet eroded newspapers’ advertising dominance. At a 2010 Berkshire conference, Buffett remarked that it “blows your mind” how quickly the business had unraveled.

    He began pulling back soon after,  stepping down from The Washington Post’s board in 2011. Berkshire, which was at one point the paper’s largest investor, swapped its 28 percent stake in Graham Holdings Co., the Post’s then-parent company, for a Miami television station in 2014. The move followed Jeff Bezos’ $250 million acquisition of the paper a year earlier.

    By the end of the 2010s, Berkshire had exited the newspaper business entirely, selling a portfolio of 30 local publications to Lee Enterprises for $140 million in cash. The group included titles such as Buffalo News, the Omaha World-Herald and Tulsa World.

    “The world was changed hugely, and it did it gradually,” Buffett said of the industry’s decline in a 2019 interview with Yahoo Finance. “It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to… toast.” Even then, he predicted that major publishers such as The New York Times might endure. As for the rest: “They’re going to disappear.”

    The New York Times has indeed thrived, in part thanks to an aggressive expansion into games, recipes and video. Others have struggled. Under Bezos’ ownership, The Washington Post has wrestled with declining advertising revenue and subscriptions. These troubles came to a head earlier this month, when roughly one-third of the newsroom was laid off, with cuts hitting sports, books, international and metro coverage particularly hard. The Los Angeles Times, owned by biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, has faced similar turbulence, including a newsroom reduction of more than 20 percent in 2024.

    Buffett’s vote of confidence has further buoyed The New York Times. Its stock surged to an all-time high this week after Berkshire disclosed its stake, capping a 12-month run in which shares climbed 57 percent.

    Warren Buffett’s Final Berkshire Bet Brings Him Back to Newspapers

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Warren Buffett’s reign as Berkshire Hathaway CEO is over. New boss Greg Abel faces 3 big challenges in his wake.

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    • Warren Buffett has retired as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO, making way for his top deputy, Greg Abel.

    • Abel’s key challenges include deploying Berkshire’s huge cash pile and expanding his remit.

    • He also has to navigate making changes without harming Berkshire’s culture, close watchers say.

    Warren Buffett has officially retired as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO after six decades in charge. Close watchers say Greg Abel, who took the reins on New Year’s Day, faces three key challenges.

    Abel’s biggest hurdle will be “finding a way to intelligently allocate” Berkshire’s vast and growing cash pile, Alex Morris, the author of “Buffett and Munger Unscripted” and the founder of investment research service TSOH, told Business Insider.

    Berkshire’s trove of cash, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets recently breached $350 billion — a figure that exceeds the market values of Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, and General Electric.

    Read more about the leadership transition underway at Berkshire Hathaway:

    Abel could use Berkshire’s war chest to fund stock buybacks, acquire other businesses, or pay dividends to shareholders, Morris said.

    Yet Buffett hasn’t found any of those to be fruitful avenues in recent years. Berkshire hasn’t repurchased shares in its past five reported quarters, only paid a dividend on one occasion under Buffett, in 1967, and has made few material acquisitions in the past 15 years.

    As a business icon and legendary investor, Buffett was given “more of a pass” by Wall Street and Berkshire shareholders for hoarding cash than Abel is likely to receive, Morris said.

    “Finding a solution here is challenging,” he continued, before suggesting Abel might consider a one-off special dividend.

    Greg Abel (middle) took over as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO on January 1.AP Images / Nati Harnik

    Prior to becoming CEO, Abel headed up Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy and the BNSF Railway.

    Abel is recognized as a world-class operator, but that’s “fundamentally different from identifying accretive acquisitions in the public and private markets,” Luke Rahbari, the CEO of Equity Armor Investments, told Business Insider.

    Buffett and his late business partner, Charlie Munger, designed Berkshire as a web of decentralized, autonomous subsidiaries, freeing them to spend much of their days reading corporate filings and searching for compelling investments.

    “Greg Abel will not have the time to do this,” David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland, told Business Insider.

    Kass said the new boss will have a “full plate” overseeing Berkshire’s subsidiaries, including insurers such as Geico for the first time, managing its roughly $300 billion stock portfolio, and making major allocation decisions outside of the company including acquisitions and other deals.

    Buffett and Munger built Berkshire’s culture around core values such as trust, honesty, patience, discipline, and long-term thinking.

    They delegated “almost to the point of abdication,” they told shareholders in their Owner’s Manual. The company had nearly 400,000 employees at the end of 2024, but only 27 worked in its Omaha headquarters, per its latest annual report.

    Abel is expected to be a more hands-on manager than Buffett. He’s already announced several leadership changes, including the appointment of Berkshire’s first general counsel and a new divisional president.

    “The challenge will be institutionalizing the culture while professionalizing a headquarters that has historically been intentionally lean,” Rahbari said.

    He added that Abel doesn’t have Buffett’s track record and will have to earn the trust awarded to his predecessor.

    “Abel will have to navigate complex relationships with subsidiary management teams where the ‘loyalty discount’ previously given to Buffett may no longer apply,” he said.

    Read the original article on Business Insider

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  • Berkshire Hathaway event gives good view of Warren Buffett’s successor but also raises new questions

    Berkshire Hathaway event gives good view of Warren Buffett’s successor but also raises new questions

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    This year’s Berkshire Hathaway meeting gave shareholders their best chance yet to hear from the man who will one day take over as CEO when Warren Buffett is gone, but Buffett said for the first time Saturday that Greg Abel should also take responsibility for the company’s investments after he takes over, raising new questions about the succession plan.

    Abel put his encyclopedic knowledge of the utility business that he led directly for years on display and delved into railroad operations and potential acquisitions that Berkshire pursued while sharing the stage with Buffett all day. For his part, the 93-year-old billionaire showed investors he is still sharp.

    Abel pointed out that it required a major culture shift to get workers at PacifiCorp and the other utilities, who have long focused all their energy on keeping the lights on, to think about shutting the power down at times when the risk that their power lines could spark wildfires is too great. He also said BNSF railroad is working on getting “our cost structure right” after delivering disappointing results.

    Succession was clearly top of mind for many of the thousands of people who filled an Omaha arena to listen to the two men after last fall’s death of Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. Buffett, Abel and Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s other top executive who oversees the company’s insurers, reassured investors that Berkshire’s board spends plenty of time focused on “what would happen to the operation if I get hit by a truck,” as Jain put it. Finding the right replacement for any of the three of them will be important.

    Previously, Buffett had said that when Abel becomes CEO, investment managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, who’s also taken on the responsibility of being Geico’s CEO, would handle Berkshire’s massive portfolio. But Buffett said Saturday that his thinking has evolved, and that “I would probably, knowing Greg, I would leave the capital allocation to Greg.”

    And Buffett said because Abel understands businesses so well, he also understands stocks.

    But Edward Jones analyst James Shanahan said a good business doesn’t always make a good stock unless you get the timing and position size right, and there is an art to that.

    “I think stock picking is hard. I don’t think it’s something you can just start doing and be good at it,” Shanahan said.

    Abel does have a history of making multibillion-dollar deals when he was the head of Berkshire’s utility unit for a decade, including the acquisitions of NV Energy and AltaLink, but he’s never been a stock picker. Weschler and Combs might be able to help Abel get the timing right and find opportunities in the stock market, but Buffett didn’t say that Saturday.

    Abel just reassured shareholders that “the capital allocation principles that we use today will be maintained.”

    “Does that give you more or less confidence post-Buffett? I would say it’s got to give you less — not because it’s a worse circumstance — but because it hasn’t been very transparent and communicated that clearly. You’ve got to start asking, well, what else is going to change?” said Cole Smead with Smead Capital Management.

    Abel definitely has the confidence of the CEOs at all of Berkshire’s many varied noninsurance businesses who report to him and ask his advice on any challenges they are facing.

    “Greg sees so much more than I do on a daily basis. So his perspective is valued, and his wisdom is something that is such a luxury for all of us to be able to tap into,” said Dan Sheridan, who just became CEO of Brooks Running this year after his predecessor retired. He said Abel is always humble and curious about the business, even while asking challenging questions.

    See’s Candies CEO Pat Egan added that Abel reflects all of Berkshire’s core values, with the company’s emphasis on integrity, taking care of customers and strengthening brands, while still giving Berkshire’s subsidiaries the freedom to operate independently.

    “He really expects us to know our business, understand the parameters, and to run our business on a day to day basis,” said Tim Baucom, CEO of flooring giant Shaw Industries. “So I feel like I have all the freedom of the world, but with freedom comes responsibility.”

    The shareholders who attended the meeting and spent hours shopping and talking with executives at the booths Berkshire subsidiaries set up when they weren’t listening to Buffett and Abel remain confident. Some of them even got the chance to take selfies with Abel, though Buffett no longer tours the exhibit hall in public.

    “I think they’ll be fine,” said Michael Grizzard, who made the trip to Omaha from Richmond, Virginia, for the second time. “They’re in good hands, and I think they have a good culture.”

    Smead said even Buffett, who is easily one of the greatest investors the world has ever seen, has been having a hard time lately finding good investments big enough to make a difference at Berkshire except for the $135 billion Apple stake that remains its largest investment even after some trimming this year.

    So no matter how good an investor Abel is, he will have a hard time finding deals big enough to provide a meaningful boost to Berkshire’s earnings that approached $13 billion in a down first quarter. That challenge is a big part of why Buffett has warned investors not to expect any of the “eye-popping performance” of Berkshire’s past.

    But for now, Buffett showed that Abel may not need to take over anytime soon because he looked good and he has long said he has no plans to retire, even if he acknowledged Saturday that he doesn’t have the same energy he used to. CFRA Research analyst Cathy Seifert came away impressed with his stamina.

    “There wasn’t anything in that performance that I found worrisome or troubling,” Seifert said.

    ___

    For more AP coverage of Warren Buffett look here: https://apnews.com/hub/warren-buffett. For Berkshire Hathaway news, see here: https://apnews.com/hub/berkshire-hathaway-inc. Follow Josh Funk online at https://apnews.com/author/josh-funk,https://www.twitter.com/funkwrite and https://www.linkedin.com/in/funkwrite.

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  • Warren Buffett to Host Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting with Succession in Focus

    Warren Buffett to Host Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting with Succession in Focus

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    Warren Buffett
    Shareholders shop for items at the Pampered Chef display at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder’s meeting on April 30, 2022 in Omaha, Neb. Scott Olson/Getty Images

    Tomorrow (May 4), Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) will kick off its annual shareholder meeting in the investing conglomerate’s home base in Omaha, Neb. This year, Buffett will host the meeting without his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, who passed away late last year at the age of 99. Thousands of Berkshire shareholders will look for updates on  Buffett’s succession plan as well as his next big bet, as the company is also set to report first-quarter earnings tomorrow morning.

    It will not be the first time Buffett leads the shareholder meeting by himself, though. He held Berkshire’s 2020 meeting—virtually due to Covid-19—without Munger and said, “It particularly doesn’t feel like an annual meeting because my partner of 60 years, Charlie Munger, is not sitting up here.”

    Munger’s passing in November put Berkshire’s energy business chief Greg Abel and insurance chief Ajit Jain in the spotlight. In 2021, Munger revealed at that year’s shareholder meeting that Abel would succeed Buffett as CEO if anything happened to the CEO. “The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett told CNBC subsequently. He added that, if for some reason Abel couldn’t do the job, Jain would step in as CEO.

    Abel, 59, and Jain, 70, were promoted to vice chairmen of Berkshire Hathaway’s board in 2018 and have taken on a larger role in recent years. “Ajit and Greg have rare talents, and Berkshire blood flows through their veins,” Buffett wrote in his 2018 letter to shareholders. 

    In April this year, Abel joined Buffett on his business trip to Japan, where he made large investments in the country’s top trading houses. Abel “does all the work, and I take the bows—it’s exactly what I wanted,” Buffett told CNBC at the time.

    Another item in focus at tomorrow’s meeting will be Buffett’s next big bet, especially given Berkshire’s giant cash pile. At the end of 2023, Berkshire had a record $168 billion in cash. Shareholders are eager to know how Buffett plans to invest that money.

    During the December quarter, Berkshire reduced its stake in Apple (its largest holding), Paramount Global and HP while increasing shares in Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and Sirius XM Holdings. Also late last year, Berkshire acquired a mystery stock that the company requested the SEC for permission to keep confidential. Shareholders may expect the company to share more details about that as well.

    Warren Buffett to Host Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting with Succession in Focus

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    Sissi Cao

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