At 94 years old, Warren Buffett stunned the investor world when he announced he was stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
But he had a simple answer for why he decided to hand over the position to Greg Abel at the end of the year.
“There was no magic moment,” Buffett said to The Wall Street Journal in an interview.
“How do you know the day that you become old?”
Abel, who holds the position of CEO at Berkshire Hathaway Energy and serves as the vice chairman overseeing Berkshire’s non-insurance divisions, is set to take over from Buffett at the beginning of 2026. In the announcement, Buffett mentioned he would retain his role as chairman until his passing.
“I didn’t really start getting old, for some strange reason, until I was about 90,” he continued to WSJ.
“But when you start getting old, it does become â it’s irreversible.”
Some of those symptoms, he said: losing his balance, having difficulty recalling names, a harder time reading the newspaper.
Abel, 62, an Edmonton, Alberta-born businessman, was designated as Buffett’s successor in 2021.
Having been with Berkshire Hathaway since 1965, Buffett disclosed this news during the company’s annual shareholder gathering, an occasion frequently referred to as “Woodstock for Capitalists.”
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But Buffett told the Journal he still plans to keep working, and his investing acumen is very much intact.
“My health is fine, in the sense that I feel good every day,” he said.
“I’m here at the office and I get to work with people I love, that they like me pretty well, and we have a good time.”
As for his retirement plans from Omaha: “I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas ⦠My interests are still the same.”
