Howard Buffett served on Berkshire board since 1993

Warren Buffett announced Friday he is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, ending a run that began in 1965, and named his 71-year-old son Howard “Howie” Buffett as his successor at the roughly $1 trillion conglomerate.

Howard Buffett has served on the Berkshire board since 1993, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the announcement. He told the paper in a 2025 interview that the company’s headquarters would stay put. “It will never move from Omaha, Nebraska,” he said.

In that interview, the elder Buffett was explicit about his choice. “He is getting it because he’s my son,” Warren Buffett said. He added that he “care[s] more about the future of Berkshire after I die than during the period I’m alive,” describing Berkshire as “the type of successful company that takes a long time to build and could be torn apart very easily if it fell into the hands of people who would want to break it up.”

The chairmanship differs from the chief executive role. At a 2013 investor conference in Omaha, short-seller Doug Kass challenged the succession plan directly. “Howard has never run a diversified business, nor is he an expert on enterprise risk-management,” Kass said. “Away from the accident of birth, how is Howard the most qualified person to take on this role?”

Warren Buffett responded by distinguishing the chair’s job from running the company. “He won’t have to think about running the business,” he said. “He’ll only have to think about whether the board—and himself, but as a member of the board—whether the board may need to change the CEO.”

Howie Buffett’s resume is unconventional for a conglomerate chairman. As a young adult, he dropped out of college, worked at Berkshire’s candy company See’s, and eventually turned to agriculture, running a farm his father bought. He said he paid market-rate rent for the property.

His public-sector work included a seat as a county commissioner in Omaha in the late 1980s, a turn as chair of the state ethanol board, and two terms as sheriff of Macon County in central Illinois in 2017 and 2018. The sheriff’s post came after he served as an auxiliary deputy.

In the corporate world, he was a vice president and assistant to the chairman at agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s, and later a partner and investor at agricultural equipment maker GSI Group.

His corporate board experience is broader. Starting with ADM in 1991, he has served on boards including Coca-Cola — a longtime Berkshire holding — bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Slim Jim and Hunt’s ketchup maker ConAgra Foods.

In the 2025 interview, Howie Buffett offered little hint of any new strategic direction. Much about the company should not change, he said, and he intends to continue Berkshire’s tradition of annual meetings in which shareholders question management for hours.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which the elder Buffett has been funding with Berkshire shares, focuses on food security and agriculture. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the foundation committed more than $800 million toward Ukrainian food assistance, demining operations and war-crime investigations, among other causes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Warren Buffett has said he will transfer all of his remaining Berkshire stake to his children’s foundations, including Howie’s, by 2034.