Abel takes over for Buffett in less than two weeks. Wall Street has some advice for new Berkshire CEO

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With Warren Buffett’s planned departure as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO less than two weeks away, some on Wall Street have advice for incoming CEO Greg Abel.

Glenview Trust CIO Bill Stone says the most important thing Abel can do is “don’t try to be Warren Buffett.”

Buffett and Charlie Munger, he said on Yahoo Finance, were the “greatest duo” in investing of all time. “Trying to beat them at their game, so to speak, is probably not the right thing.”

Stone thinks Abel should concentrate on increasing operating earnings, reducing the number of outstanding shares, and being ready to seize opportunities when they arise.

On Yahoo Finance’s “Market Dominion,” Boyar Research President Jonathan Boyar told CNBC alum Josh Lipton the best thing Abel could do to win Wall Street’s trust is to “buy an extremely large amount of Berkshire stock personally and really put his money where his mouth is.”

According to the 2025 annual meeting proxy, Abel already owns what Boyar calls a “fair amount” of Berkshire shares that are currently valued at around $171 million, but he notes that “all of that was bought when, obviously, Buffett” ran the company.

Boyar expects Abel will impose a lot more management oversight than Buffett, who famously took a hands-off approach to the subsidiaries.

As a result of that decentralization, Boyar says, “There’s probably a lot of fat to cut. There’re probably divisions that can be consolidated. There are many things they could do to enhance profitability that Buffett just hasn’t wanted to do.

“Buffett is the greatest capital allocator and the greatest investor of all time. He’s not known as the best manager of all time. Greg Abel might be able to do things that he couldn’t or wouldn’t do.”

After Buffett announced at the May annual meeting that he planned to step down as CEO at the end of the year, Berkshire’s B shares fell 15% over three months.

They have cut that drop to 8.4% as of Friday’s close.

The Motley Fool’s David Jagielski writes Buffett’s long tenure gave the company “plenty of time to prepare for a successor” and Abel is “well prepared” to be CEO.

He predicts Abel’s approach” won’t differ a lot” from Buffett’s but there could still be significant changes in Berkshire’s portfolio. The addition of a stake in the big tech stock Alphabet in the third quarter may have given investors a “glimpse” of the future.

He’s also “cautiously optimistic” Berkshire may put more emphasis on growth stocks and “pivot away from slow-growing investments like Kraft Heinz.”

Jagielski expects Berkshire to be an “excellent buy” for next year and longer. “If it dips in value after Buffett leaves, that would simply make it an even more attractive investment to buy.”

Mel Casey at FBB Capital Partners tells Yahoo Finance the diversity of Berkshire’s subsidiaries gives it an “all-weather quality” so that “you could almost think of it as a lower-risk alternative to owning the broader market.”

He sees Berkshire as “pretty reasonably valued” in a “year of pretty high valuations for U.S. large cap stocks.”

On the bearish side, Casey warns there is a risk of losing the “Buffett premium.”

“There’s definitely a caution out there that some of the core investors are investors in Buffett rather than in the actual fundamentals of the company itself.”

UNP CEO Jim Vena is quoted by Reuters as saying he is confident the deal will be approved. “If we stand still, we are going to get left behind. I’m not into that. The benefits of this transaction are undeniable.”

Buffett told CNBC last August that Berkshire would not try to counter a possible UP-NSC combination by merging BNSF with CSX, but the two railroads did announce what they called “a collaboration” to provide “seamless, efficient, coast-to-coast solutions to ship between the western and eastern U.S.”

BNSF’s routes are in the western U.S. while CSX operates in the east.

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AUDIENCE MEMBER: You have said before that your role will be divided into parts for your succession, one of which will be the responsibility of maintaining culture by having [son] Howard [Buffett] as non-executive chairman.

What is the plan for how Berkshire will maintain its culture when Howard no longer fills the role, and what should shareholders watch for to make sure that the culture is being properly maintained decades from now when I am your age?…

WARREN BUFFETT: By far, the main factor in keeping Berkshire’s culture is that you have a board and you’ll have successor board members. You have managers and you’ll have successor managers. And you have shareholders that clearly recognize the special nature of the culture, that have embraced the culture. When they sold their businesses to us, they wanted to join that culture.

It’s a — it thrusts out people that really aren’t in tune with it, and there are very few of them. And it embraces those who enjoy and appreciate it. And I think, to some extent, we don’t have a lot of competition on it. So it becomes very identifiable, and it works…

CHARLIE MUNGER: I really think the culture is going to surprise everybody — how well it lasts — and how well they do. They’re going to wonder why they ever made any fuss over us in the first place. It’s going to work very well.

WARREN BUFFETT: We’ve got so many good ingredients in place, just in terms of the businesses and people already here, you know, that — at the companies.

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s what I’m saying.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: There’s just so much power in place.

BRK.A stock price: $745,600.00

BRK.B stock price: $494.53

BRK.B P/E (TTM): 15.81

Berkshire market capitalization: $1,068,856,999,340

Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)

Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)

No Berkshire stock repurchases since May 2024.

(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)

Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 14, 2025, except for:

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@cnbc.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

If you aren’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.

Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch