Crowd shrinks as Berkshire Hathaways new CEO leads the annual meeting for the first time Saturday
OMAHA, Neb.(AP) — The folksy wisdom and jokes that were a staple of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for decades when Warren Buffett was leading the show will be missing Saturday, but shareholders still started lining up at midnight outside a Nebraska arena to listen to new CEO Greg Abel.Attendance is down significantly this year with the arena only a little over half full as the meeting started.
That’s much different from the past few years when more than 40,000 attended to listen to the 95-year-old Buffett and — before his death in 2023, Buffett’s longtime partner Charlie Munger was always part of the fun.Buffett gave up the CEO title in January, but he remains chairman and will be sitting with the rest of the Berkshire board on the floor to listen at the meeting.Saturday’s meeting began with a video tribute to Buffett filled with clips from the previous 60 years of annual meetings.
The first clip showed the standing ovation Buffett received last year after he surprised shareholders by announcing that he would step down.Abel then announced the symbolic move of retiring jerseys with Buffett’s and Munger’s names on them that will hang in the rafters of the arena.Buffett took the microphone briefly to praise Abel and recognize Apple CEO Tim Cook, who attended the meeting.Buffett said Abel has done a tremendous job so far, and Cook helped Berkshire’s initial $35 billion investment in Apple grow to be worth $185 billion today.
Cook even got a longer round of applause than Buffett did when he was introduced.“Greg is doing everything I did and then some,” Buffett said, so his decision to step down has worked out great so far.Abel has been on stage next to the legendary investor at the annual meetings for several years, but this year is his first time running the show.Investors expect the conversation to focus more on how the dozens of companies Berkshire owns are doing.
The conglomerate owns major insurers like Geico, several major utilit...