May 5 (UPI) — The board of Berkshire Hathaway voted to keep Warren Buffett as its chairman and appointed a new company president and CEO.
On Sunday, board members voted unanimously to name Greg Abel as Berkshire Hathaway’s president and CEO starting Jan. 1 of next year and to keep Buffett as chairman, according to a company release.
Buffett, 94, stunned shareholders with a surprise announcement of his pending retirement during an annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Neb., on Saturday in front of roughly 20,000 attendees.
“I could be helpful, I believe, in that in certain respects, if we ran into periods of great opportunity or anything,” he said over the weekend.
At the meeting Buffett asked the 12-member board to name Greg Abel, the current vice chairman of non-insurance operations, as its new company president and CEO.
Abel, 62, is also chair of Berkshire Hathaway Energy and since 2021 has been designated as Buffett’s successor.
On Friday, stock shares in Berkshire closed at a record market value of more than $1 trillion.
Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway’s largest shareholder, controlling approximately 31.2% of its voting interest, in February celebrated 60 years at the helm of the global company he helped create in the mid-1950s.
Meanwhile, the billionaire company chief said he believes the American economy will steady itself after the market turmoil created in the wake of the announcement of international tariffs by U.S. President Donald Trump, reiterating his position that tariffs should not be used as “an act of war” with other nations.
