Warren Buffett stepped down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway on Dec. 31, handing the day-to-day reins of the trillion-dollar company to Greg Abel after more than half a century at the top. Abel, who has been with Berkshire for over a quarter century, now has the final say on the company’s operations and its 48-stock investment portfolio.
The handoff matters because Berkshire’s portfolio has long been shaped by Buffett’s instincts, and Abel is now the one deciding what comes next. Buffett and Abel are both value investors, but their own lists of favored holdings show a subtle shift in emphasis from legacy names to a newer set of long-term bets.
Buffett, in early 2024, outlined eight holdings he viewed as indefinite, calling Coca-Cola and American Express untouchable and also naming Occidental Petroleum as an indefinite holding. He also put Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Itochu, Marubeni and Sumitomo in the same forever-type category, a list that reflected Berkshire’s lasting ties to five Japanese trading houses.
Abel added his own stamp in late February, when he released his first letter to shareholders as Berkshire’s CEO and said Apple and Moody’s were companies he believes will compound over decades. Between the two lists, seven of Berkshire’s 10-largest holdings were described as indefinite or compound-type investments by Buffett or Abel, while Bank of America was absent from both.
That omission stands out because Berkshire’s 13F filings, the quarterly disclosures that let investors track buying and selling by large institutions, showed Buffett was a persistent seller of Bank of America stock for six consecutive quarters before his retirement. Buffett remains chairman of Berkshire’s board, but the succession is now real: Abel holds the operational power, and the portfolio is already showing where his judgment overlaps with Buffett’s and where it does not.
For Berkshire shareholders, the next phase will be measured not by whether Abel can imitate Buffett, but by how closely he preserves the positions Buffett treated as permanent and how boldly he reshapes the rest.
