Warren Buffett Retires As Berkshire Hathaway CEO After 55 Years (nbcnews.com) 55
Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. "The 95-year-old, often referred to as the 'Oracle of Omaha' and the 'billionaire next door,' will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most successful asset managers in the world," reports NBC News. From the report: Greg Abel, the 63-year-old lesser-known CEO of Berkshire's energy business, will take the helm of the conglomerate on Thursday. Buffett will remain its chairman.
Under Buffett's leadership, Nebraska-based Berkshire has thrived at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, with investments in industries ranging from railroads and insurance to candy and ice cream.
Along the way, while living in the same house he bought for just over $30,000 in the late 1950s, he redefined investing for the American public with his folksy and practical advice, became one of the wealthiest people on Earth and dedicated much of that fortune to philanthropy. Berkshire's most significant tech bet was initiated in 2016 when it invested $1 billion. Apple has since become Berkshire Hathaway's largest single holding, representing over 20% of the portfolio and valued at more than $65 billion.
While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier.
Throughout the years, Buffett expressed his disinterest in cryptocurrency and said he would "never own bitcoin," referring to it as "probably rat poison squared" and a "gambling token."
Under Buffett's leadership, Nebraska-based Berkshire has thrived at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, with investments in industries ranging from railroads and insurance to candy and ice cream.
Along the way, while living in the same house he bought for just over $30,000 in the late 1950s, he redefined investing for the American public with his folksy and practical advice, became one of the wealthiest people on Earth and dedicated much of that fortune to philanthropy. Berkshire's most significant tech bet was initiated in 2016 when it invested $1 billion. Apple has since become Berkshire Hathaway's largest single holding, representing over 20% of the portfolio and valued at more than $65 billion.
While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier.
Throughout the years, Buffett expressed his disinterest in cryptocurrency and said he would "never own bitcoin," referring to it as "probably rat poison squared" and a "gambling token."
Time to give your money away! (Score:1)
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Re:Time to give your money away! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it time to give his money away? If he just retired, now is precisely when he'll need it.
Warren Buffett is worth about 173 billion dollars, pegging him as the world's 4th or 5th richest person if memory serves.
He's 95 years old. If he spent 100 million dollars a day, he would need to live another 47 years to spend it all.
This is a fair example of end stage capitalism. Will 100 million dollars a day make him live another ~50 years?
(To be sure, Warren Buffett is quite well aware of the dependences of wealth and worries about it, but has not found a solution he's willing to communicate.)
I've been called a communist because I am against limited groups having wealth of this magnitude. (I do not consider myself a communist: It is an economic system whereby one greedy person can wreck the entire economy by just being greedy, which is base immoral human nature.) And while Warren Buffett did start with the advantage of a modicum of wealth from his upbringing, he didn't inherit gobs and gobs of money. He amassed the first part of his wealth by his own action, (Did the same thing I did - pinball machines) it was not at his own effort past about age 30.
I've read that the minimum wage was established in 1938 at twenty five cents per hour. At that time, Gold was $35.00 [onlygold.com] per troy ounce. 8 hours a day at twenty five cents per hour is $2, so about 17.5 days to make an ounce of gold.
Today, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, $58 dollars per day, gold spot price is $4,319.50, so to earn the price of an ounce would take about 74 and a half days.
I went to get the historical data from data.gov; as so many other data sets in this post DOGE world, it has been removed and now if you want data prior to 1984 you have to pay for it. The average wage in 1938 was ~$2,100 (or 60 troy ounces) The average wage in the USA today is somewhere around $68,000.00 in 2024 (or 16 ounces.)
The wealth of the nation comes not be the effort of your own hands and mind anymore. It comes from weaponizing capitalism. We Americans shout and cheer for unrestricted unfettered, unregulated, uncontrolled capitalism. There is a reason they call us "Wage slaves" and we are leaping into our own chains with wild abandon. There are no easy answers that all find palatable and comforting. Most are even against taxing the rich. This is the power of wealth. They get to program the people into that attitude and that unions are bad (which as with anything, they are not inherently good or bad, being run by people with good or ill intention.)
I don't have the answers either. I'm simply pointing out it's raining money and the rich are taking our share of it. Turns out communism isn't the only thing greed destroys; it destroys capitalism too.
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* 10 million a day, not 100.
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Actually, it's people who are either ignorant or greedy that do this. America just happens to have plenty of people that fit the description.
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There is no such thing as capitalism. That is a Marxist concept. See here
https://dagens-fel.livejournal... [livejournal.com]
You should call i (free) market economy.
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You shouldn't call it "free" market anything as that's an ideal, not an actual thing.
Saying you shouldn't call it capitalism because that's a Marxist concept is prejudiced in its own fashion, because it discounts all Marxist thought. It's a perfectly valid concept because you can have money and exchange it for goods whether you do or don't allow capital to control the means of production.
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"It's a perfectly valid concept because you can have money and exchange it for goods whether you do or don't allow capital to control the means of production."
That is not even what Marxists refer to with capitalism. LOL.
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This is a fair example of end stage capitalism.
What is "end stage capitalism", how is it bad, and how can you prove that it exists and is happening?
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What is "end stage capitalism"
When most people cannot rase a family on one income, afford housing, food, clothing, and health care.
how is it bad
Because with wealth redistribution from those that make the wealth happen to those that operate it makes commodities such as food, housing and clothing unaffordable.
and how can you prove that it exists and is happening?
the top 10% hold around ~70% of the wealth of the entire USA.
13.5 percent of the population go hungry every day, and 55% cannot afford unprocessed food for every day consumption.
Income inequality is rampant. One CEO "earns" 6,731:1 in pay. That's
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I read your reply a couple times and thought about it a bit.
What is "end stage capitalism"
When most people cannot rase a family on one income, afford housing, food, clothing, and health care.
Yeah but, when you say "end stage capitalism" it sounds like there is some kind of theory, maybe formal, on the stages of capitalism and how an "end stage" is defined and how you know what's going on now meets that definition. Why did you pick the definition you picked?
Also I would like to see some kind of statistics that say what you say is happening.
how is it bad
Because with wealth redistribution from those that make the wealth happen to those that operate it makes commodities such as food, housing and clothing unaffordable.
I didn't understand most of this sentence. Those that operate what? What is "it" here?
and how can you prove that it exists and is happening?
the top 10% hold around ~70% of the wealth of the entire USA.
13.5 percent of the population go hungry every day, and 55% cannot afford unprocessed food for every day consumption.
Income inequality is rampant. One CEO "earns" 6,731:1 in pay. That's not percent - that's A&F's CEO's pay - equivalent to the work of 6,731 employees. I cherry picked that because it's shocking. The average is around 900 to one.
Can I see
Re: Time to give your money away! (Score:2)
He’s already doing it. (Score:4, Informative)
Time to give your money away, Warren! We've waited long enough.
He long ago pledged to give away 99% of his fortune, and has already given away at least 60 billion. That isn’t chump change.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/0... [cnbc.com]
This isn’t hidden information. Maybe check your media bubble?
Re:He’s already doing it. (Score:5, Funny)
I am forced to agree that 60 billion dollars does not equal 99 percent. Units don't match for one. Learn how to math.
As for him pledging to give away 99% of his wealth (which I admit $60B is not) ... note that he's not dead yet. You don't know what his plans are for the future, or in his will.
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He didn’t pledge to give it away instantly.
That was the whole point of my post.
Our sympathies. Logic is hard.
For you especially, it seems.
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Pledges are made to broken. [yahoo.com]
It was just PR to divert attention his enormous greed and parasitism, just like Bill Gates who pays for a press release once a year or so about giving away all his money, though he of course hasn't and never will.
Huh. A painfully obvious misreading of my original post and the news. That article shows he changed the way he’s giving away money for practical reasons: it doesn’t show that he “lied” in his promise to give it away.
Try a little self reflection. You’ll succeed far better in life if you simply assume a man with one of the world’s most trusted reputations hasn’t been lying for decades. He’s earned this reputation and it’s well worth learning from him.
Re: Time to give your money away! (Score:2, Funny)
go ahead and look into that. He rescinded all of that and is giving it to family members instead. The whole thing was just to make himself look good. Heâ(TM)s always been smoking mirrors the whole time, the guy is just a nasty oligarch asshole like the rest
Re: Time to give your money away! (Score:2)
These kinds of things always make me wonder a few things.
First, warren probably doesn't have much cash. He owns stuff, that on paper is worth money.
Now, if he were to sell everything... Is there enough money in the world to buy it all (at current valuation). I imagine banks are able to create mlney out of thin air, but what happens next after that?
It would be really interesting if a real economist tried to model what would happen if someone rich like buffet or musk converted everything they own into cash, a
Re:Time to give your money away! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if he doesn't give his money away, Warren Buffet has done more good for mankind by the way he lived his life and the way he ran his companies. He is a unicorn among private equity investors, always thinking about the long-term. If more business owners thought like he does, companies would be both better citizens of the world, and better employers. We need more Warren Buffets.
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You mean, actually giving away his wealth, like this? https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/0... [cnbc.com]
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Whatever. I literally just *did* my research. You haven't provided a single link, to anything. I'm guessing your source is a YouTube influencer who's got a beef. If there's anybody I'd want to model my business strategy after, it's Warren Buffet's. I got *my* info from a credible news source, and I didn't pass along many others that came up in my search. I stand by what I say too.
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Here's a quote from Fortune [fortune.com], a magazine that's been around a while and has a long history about caring what our rich betters like to do with their copious free time:
Nice. He sits on a machine that doesn't allow him to give away his money, instead he's condemned to keep it all to himself. It's like
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Maybe you didn't finish reading your article.
In total, Buffett’s giving has reached over $60 billion—much of it to the Gates Foundation, which focuses on fighting poverty, disease, and inequity.
Somehow, I'm having trouble feeling bad that Buffet has chosen to give away $60B so far, and the other $90B over a long span of time. It seems like another case of...long-term thinking.
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I did, thanks for checking! Maybe you didn't read closely my comment? He gave 60B to his friend Bill Gates, and then changed his mind when it turned out that BG is friends with Epstein, and has also cheated on his wife (who's divorced him and is doing a much better job giving away her half of BG's fortune). But: Buffet's current net worth is ~ 150B. He's 95 years old.
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The article does *not* say Buffet withdrew the $48B from the Gates Foundation. He simply ended *future* donations to it.
And in any case, he didn't give the money to Bill Gates, he gave it to the foundation. Foundations are required by US law to spend their money for philanthropic purposes, and there are no indications that the Gates foundation is doing otherwise.
Some have speculated that Epstein was a factor in the "breakup" but Buffett never said this. Rather, the change has more to do with the divorce of
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BG's foundation was created around 2000 for two reasons. One is to give his family an external source of income and power. The other is to protect his wealth against a possible prosecution for Microsoft's monopolistic practices: Having to go testify to Congress really did rattle him.
That's why such entities exist, they are not truly charities in the selfless sense of the word. If Buffett didn't realize this when he donated, it makes him naive, not the canny investor he portrays himself to be. If Buffett di
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Some, like Trump, do use foundations to "park" money, then get it out by paying people enormous salaries to "administer" the foundation. That's not what Gates and Buffett did. Their money *actually* went to good causes. No, I don't pretend that either are selfless altruists. But you are making accusations that are not supported by the facts.
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My only accusation has been that Buffett is hypocritical. I don't put him on a pedestal, and I don't expect him to act like an angel. I pointed out that he manipulates public opinion like many others. It's self-serving with a veneer of purity. I don't buy it. I'm happy to point it out and cop the flak.
The Gates Foundation's money goes to the Gates' pet projects, and it does so with strings attached. It's meddling with local health policies around the world, and forces change by granting and with-holding f
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But I am not easily impressed by people who spend money that they can easily afford. The true test of character comes when they have spent money that they cannot afford. When they are all in, that's when you find out what they truly believe, and if it is worth supporting them.
I don't know if she has given it all away, but Marlene Engelhorn is an interesting case: https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
Re:Time to give your money away! (Score:4, Interesting)
If Buffet is your idea of a hypocrite, then I'd say we need more hypocrites like him.
Big donors (and little ones) *always* want to direct their money towards projects and causes they care about. If you call that meddling, so be it, but there is no other kind of giving. Literally nobody says, "Here, you can have this money, I don't care what you do with it!"
Nobody's claiming Bill and Warren are saints, and that they sacrificed themselves for their causes.
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You literally said he did humanity a great service. Which is your right to say, but utterly hyperbolic and... now you've changed your mind?
Regardless, this article is way too far behind the front-page, so we'll have to leave it there before it gets archived, and we can clash again in another story.
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You don't have to be a saint, to do humanity a great service.
Crypo is terrible as an investment (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course Crypto is rat poison. There's no physical assets, whoever is the greater fool is going to be holding it as an investment while it becomes worth less.
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There's no physical assets
So, pretty much like every other fiat currency.
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Fiat currencies don't claim to have assets, instead they have the backing of a government and a mandate to use them.
Bitcoin basically destroys assets and then pretends they're backing it (spoiler: no, because they've been destroyed!), and other cryptocurrencies are usually worse. Indeed, only the stablecoins come close, and usually they're fraudulent. But in all these cases, the crypto-boosters pretend the unique advantage to their fake currency is that it's "backed" by something, when it clearly isn't.
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Crypto currency isn't really a currency. It's more like a financial security. Which is nothing more than a contract where the parties holding or exchanging it agree to abide by its terms.
Bitcoin doesn't actually destroy assets. Those other assets are still there and you are still free to hold or trade them. What it does is challenge the monopoly positions that government issues currencies have.
Even gold and silver are partly like fiat (Score:2)
Admittedly, gold and silver have a utility value, but the price is much higher than the utility value because most people want it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, not to make stuff with.
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Admittedly, gold and silver have a utility value, but the price is much higher than the utility value because most people want it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, not to make stuff with.
Silver and gold aren't like fiat, they're inherently inferior to fiat currency, for exactly the reason you cite.
PPH is deeply incorrect when he says that fiat currencies are not backed by assets. Fiat currencies are backed by legally-enforceable promises to repay debts. Every dollar created is balanced by the simultaneous creation of an obligation by someone to do some sort of productive work to generate value that is used to retire that obligation (at which point the dollar is destroyed).
Precious met
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There's no physical assets
So, pretty much like every other fiat currency.
No, fiat currency is asset-backed. The assets in question are legally-enforceable contracts to repay loans. Fiat currency is precisely a legally-enforced commitment to produce something of value in the future, bundled up into an exchangeable medium.
He owns two tech stocks (Score:3)
While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier.
In the third quarter of this year, Buffett purchased 18 million shares of Alphabet stock for $4.3 billion. He admits, he should have invested earlier [cnbc.com]:
"I had seen the product work, and I knew the kind of margins [they had]," Buffett said in 2018. "I didn't know enough about technology to know whether this really was the one that would stop the competitive race."
As he is famous for saying, invest in what you know. He didn't know enough about it and didn't invest until now. Either he saw the error of his ways or the incoming CEO took the plunge. Regardless, it will stay pay off handsomely for the company in the long run.
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Buffett's criticism of (Score:2)
...convoluted and faddish "financial instruments" reminded me a lot of CRUD/biz development stacks: almost no stack designer wants to practice YAGNI, KISS, nor parsimony anymore, just collect resume buzzwords as if they were Pokemon. And the choices are not based on nor verified by science. I've seen productivity go down: the developer time per feature has gone up over time, and so has code per feature. Something is dearly wrong. Part of it is the fucked up DOM, we need a new standard.
Crappy New Year Slash
Capital makes us productive - keep it (Score:3)
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My bet is that he did make those companies more productive. He consistently outperformed the market even after he became a significant player in the market which shows that he didn't just neglect his investments. Note: productive does not necessarily mean good. Many employees may have suffered from "productivity gains".
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Did he make the companies more productive?
He put money into the companies he wanted to support, by purchasing parts of them. He could retract his money at any time by selling the shares. That is either an endorsement of what they are doing, or an endorsement of what they plan to do.
You don't hear about him sleeping in the factory to improve processes like Musk
The majority of what Musk claims is not true. He's had at best a shaky relationship with reality for some time. He happily endorses and propagates - amongst other things - the false narrative that he launched Tesla. Don't count on his narrative of "sleeping in the
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The question is who can better manage those assets? Is it better that those assets are sold to the general market (where the incentives are for short-term gain)? Or to keep it in the family? Do Buffet's heirs have his ability to invest for the long-term? My bet is that neither will be as good as what exists now. Many a family business has gone broke because the inheritors didn't know what made the business successful in the first place.