- - Will Berkshire Hathaway Be the Same After Buffett -- or Better?

Dan Caplinger, The Motley FoolFebruary 8, 2026 at 12:29 AM

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Key Points -

Investors have been worried for years about the prospects for Warren Buffett to stop leading Berkshire Hathaway.

Now that the moment has come, though, Buffett has expressed a huge amount of confidence in Abel.

Investors might appreciate Berkshire’s lack of correlation to the broader market.

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Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) (NYSE: BRK.B) has a track record of excellence that's hard for any other stock to match. A big part of Berkshire's success has come as a result of its legendary leader, Warren Buffett, who just stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025. With decades of market outperformance under Buffett's belt, successor CEO Greg Abel has his work cut out for him to build on his predecessor's legacy.

Today, this three-part series on Berkshire Hathaway for the Voyager Portfolio concludes with a closer look at the CEO succession from Buffett to Abel and what investors can expect. And although I won't be adding Berkshire Hathaway stock to this portfolio, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't strongly consider it as a complement to the other individual stock holdings you may own.

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Two hands with one passing a baton to the other.

Image source: Getty Images.

The inevitable passing of the baton

Given Buffett's incredible tenure at Berkshire, succession has been in the forefront of shareholders' minds for a long time. For years, Buffett and former vice-chair Charlie Munger reassured Berkshire stock investors by stating that there was a plan in place without providing specifics. Then, in 2021, Berkshire announced that its board of directors had unanimously supported Abel to be Buffett's designated successor.

After that, Buffett said encouraging things about Abel's prowess on multiple occasions. Buffett is on record saying he'd rather have Abel managing his finances than any of a host of other corporate leaders or investment advisors. He even said that Abel has better management skills than he does, highlighting the important need for any Berkshire CEO to manage the conglomerate's subsidiaries adeptly while still leaving day-to-day operational decisions to respective leaders at each subsidiary. That's been a key ingredient in Berkshire's past success.

Setting Abel up for success

Perhaps the most valuable thing that Berkshire and Buffett did to set the stage for Abel to take over was to get the company's finances in top shape to give the incoming CEO maximum flexibility to pursue his own vision. For years now, Berkshire has been accumulating cash, with the figure hitting a record $382 billion as of the end of 2025.

With that amount of cash on hand, Abel will have plenty of options for capital allocation. If Abel were to find a relatively large company at an attractive valuation, then Berkshire's rich reserves would give the conglomerate opportunities that nearly any other company couldn't match. At the same time, Abel could choose to restart Berkshire's past practice of repurchasing shares of its own stock, if he found the stock price to be attractive at some point in the future. Some analysts have even gone so far as to suggest that Abel might do what was unthinkable under Buffett: look to initiate a dividend for shareholders.

Zigging when the market zags

I won't be buying Berkshire Hathaway for my Voyager Portfolio, but that doesn't mean I think it's a bad investment. In fact, Berkshire is already my top individual stock holding by far, making it unnecessary to add any more shares to my mix.

It's true that any broad-market index investor already has a considerable holding in Berkshire because of its trillion-dollar market capitalization. But what I've found that makes Berkshire especially valuable is that often, it moves higher when its more tech-focused peers in the trillion-dollar market cap club falter. That kind of ballast can make long-term investors a lot happier. I might not know exactly what Berkshire will look like a few years from now, but I share Warren Buffett's confidence that Greg Abel will be more than able to lead the company forward to new heights.

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Dan Caplinger has positions in Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Source: “AOL Money”