Beyond Buffett: A New Era for Berkshire Hathaway

"There are very few CEOs who want to make their successor’s job easy," says Berkshire director Chris Davis, "that feel a sense of duty to their successor nearly as much as Warren and Charlie have."

Christopher Davis — a longtime Berkshire Hathaway shareholder turned director — remains one of the conglomerate’s most articulate and passionate champions.

Someday, hopefully not too soon, it will be up to the board to safeguard Berkshire’s unique culture. It’s a weighty responsibility that Davis cheerfully embraces. Of all the directors, I find his insights most clearly offer a window into the soul of Berkshire.

Following Warren Buffett’s retirement announcement last month — a moment that sent shockwaves through the financial world — Davis joined “The Compound and Friends” podcast to unpack the emotional weight of that day in Omaha.

But, despite being a self-confessed “card-carrying member of the Berkshire cult”, he did not sound overly shocked by the news.

“If you went to see Babe Ruth playing late in his career — if he was 44 years old and he had won the World Series — and he announced his retirement, it would be both a surprise and not a surprise,” said Davis. “The funny thing is I was sitting next to my dad when [Buffett] made the announcement and I was sitting next to my dad at my first Berkshire meeting. I went back to that first meeting and realized that I’m older today than Warren was at that meeting — and one of the questions I asked him at that meeting was ‘What about succession?’”

“When Charlie died,” continued Davis, “he was 99-and-three-quarters. Who could be surprised to get that phone call? And yet he was also eternal. He was so timeless and he had been so much a part of our universe for so long, that in a way it was like a parent being gone. It’s natural in the order of things, but also for your whole existence they’ve been there so it feels very unnatural.”

I’m expecting 2026 to feel very unnatural without Warren or Charlie at the helm.

But we all knew this day was coming — and Davis touched on two critical points during this interview that highlight Berkshire’s resilience and Buffett’s foresight in preparing his company for a long future without him.

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Whenever he’s asked about how Berkshire Hathaway will fare without Warren Buffett’s guiding hand, Chris Davis usually draws a historical parallel to Standard Oil, a business empire that thrived long after John D. Rockefeller’s exit.

“If I were to ask you to name the second or third CEO of Standard Oil,” he said, “I bet you’d be hard-pressed [to answer]. Yet Standard Oil was among the most valuable companies on Earth for thirteen decades — because it was built to last.”

That’s no knock on Greg Abel, but a little reassurance about the nameless men and women who will follow him. A business as robust as Berkshire — a mosaic of carefully chosen enterprises across a wide variety of industries — does not need a larger-than-life leader forever. Buffett laid the granite foundation and now it’s up to his successors to keep the machine humming along.

Davis pinpointed two pillars of Standard Oil’s longevity that eerily mirror Berkshire. “[Rockefeller] built and put together incredibly long-lived assets,” he said. “And that ties to the second point about Exxon (a direct descendant of Standard Oil), that it was also built with a very idiosyncratic culture that resisted Wall Street. Remember, the old saying at Exxon was ‘[We see] governments come and go’. It was a long-term, rational culture that resisted fads. I would say those two things — without any cult of personality after John D. Rockefeller — enabled to this very day Exxon to be one of the most valuable companies on Earth.”

(In particular, Davis lauded the oil company’s executive compensation plan that can sometimes vest up to ten years after a person’s retirement. “That’s unique in Corporate America,” he noted.)

Berkshire, likewise, is a cult of rationality rather than personality. While most public companies bow to convention and hold quarterly earnings calls or issue guidance on future performance, Berkshire sidesteps that noise entirely.

Instead, Buffett communicates directly with shareholders through his annual letters and those unscripted, marathon Q&A sessions in Omaha each spring. Small deviations from the norm that forge a bond of trust with shareholders and prioritize long-term value creation over fleeting market applause.

And, in terms of long-lived assets, Buffett once cited BNSF Railway as “a business that is going to be around for 100 or 200 years”. Similarly, just last month, he said that he expects Berkshire to hold its investments in the five Japanese trading houses for at least the next fifty years. It’s the same story across much of Berkshire — from energy to insurance to countless others.

Buffett deliberately acquired and nurtured enduring assets — signaling a vision for a business empire that will outlive him by generations. (Or, at least, we all hope.)

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Davis’s most poignant comment, though, framed Buffett’s retirement less as an ending — but, rather, as the ultimate test of his legacy.

“In a sense,” said Davis, “Warren would say the transition will be his legacy. He has built Berkshire to last. You can think of so many iconic CEOs from Jack Welch to Sandy [Weill at Citigroup] to Hank [Greenberg at AIG] where they went out at a high and often left a successor something that was really stressed.”

“I think the culture at Berkshire is so much the opposite. There are very few CEOs who want to make their successor’s job easy, that feel a sense of duty to their successor nearly as much as Warren and Charlie have.”

This commitment to a seamless succession is evident across the Berkshire empire. Buffett groomed leaders like Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, while also implementing a decentralized structure that empowers subsidiary managers to run their businesses as quasi-independent entities. Moreover, Berkshire’s fortress-like balance sheet — bolstered by $328 billion of cash — affords his successor a lot of breathing room to weather any storms that might crop up.

(On the flip side, Abel could face more pressure to spend this money than Buffett ever did. But that’s a far better “problem” to have than inheriting a debt-laden business with derivative time bombs ticking away silently in the background.)

This is why, for my money, the next 10-20 years at Berkshire will probably be more fascinating than the last. We’re about to get a front-row seat to Warren Buffett’s final test — as he sends his lifelong masterpiece out into the world to sink or swim without him. I, for one, can’t wait to see how it all turns out.