Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and fifth wealthiest person in the world, thinks he didn’t start getting old until he was 90. But once it hit him, it became “irreversible.”
It’s one of the reasons he’s finally decided to step down at age 94 from Berkshire Hathaway, the company he’s led as CEO since 1970.
He’s appointed Greg Abel to be his successor, and he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Wednesday that watching his younger counterpart made him reconsider his position at the helm of the ship.
As Abel, 62, took on each day with enthusiasm and strength, Buffett’s own days had slowed.
“There was no magic moment,” Buffett told The Journal. “How do you know the day that you become old?”
The tycoon says he had vision problems, began to lose his balance and struggled to remember simple things, including people’s names.
That’s when he knew it was time.
“The difference in energy level and just how much he could accomplish in a 10-hour day compared to what I could accomplish in a 10-hour day—the difference became more and more dramatic,” he said. “He just was so much more effective at getting things done.”
On May 3, Buffett revealed that he would step down as CEO.
He’ll continue to serve as chairman of Berkshire’s board, but many fear it won’t be the same without Buffett manning the company. When he made his shock announcement at the Berkshire annual meeting, silence fell before the crowd broke into applause. Nobody had guessed he would reveal the surprise, not even Abel, his successor.
Abel joined Berkshire in 1999 and was promoted to vice chairman in 2018. By 2021, Buffett knew he had found the best person to follow in his footsteps.
“Really great talent is rare,” he said. “It’s rare in business. It’s rare in capital allocation. It’s rare in almost every human activity you can name.”
Buffett was still a young man when he took over Berkshire, which was then just a struggling New England textile maker. Now, it’s become a business giant that owns everything from insurance companies to household brands to a railroad. It also holds major portions of Apple and American Express. The conglomerate has nearly 400,000 employees.
“It was unfair, really, not to put Greg in the job,” he told The Journal. “The more years that Berkshire gets out of Greg, the better.”
Buffett said that while he’s still in good health, he never saw himself as CEO forever.
“I thought I would remain CEO as long as I thought I was more useful than anybody else, in terms of being CEO,” he said. “And it surprised me, you know, how long it went.”
He’s still not retiring just yet, however. He plans to keep coming into the Omaha, Nebraska office, near where he lives. Buffett resides in the same house he’s owned since 1958, which he purchased for $31,500.
“I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas,” he said with a laugh. “My interests are still the same.”
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