Greg Abel starts his Berkshire Hathaway era by buying Berkshire stock

Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B -0.28% has a new CEO, an old chairman, and a very familiar way of making a point: by buying its own stock.

The company recently disclosed that it began repurchasing shares on March 4 in a way that’s almost conspicuously un-Berkshire. In an SEC filing, the company said that “in the interest of transparency with our leadership transition, we are disclosing that we commenced repurchasing shares of our common stock.” Berkshire usually lets buybacks surface later, tucked inside a quarterly filing. This time, it chose a spotlight, precisely because Greg Abel is newly in charge — and investors are newly jumpy.

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The policy is the same one Berkshire has lived by for years: repurchase only when leadership believes the market price sits below intrinsic value, “conservatively determined,” and with no promise to keep buying if the math changes. Berkshire has said recently that the repurchase program runs through the CEO, “after consultation with the Chairman of the Board.”

The buyback restart comes after a long pause; Berkshire hadn’t repurchased shares since 2024. So this looks like Abel showing — early and clearly — how he plans to talk to shareholders, with the same old Berkshire vocabulary, just with his signature under it. Yes, a new CEO is here. Yes, the old rules still apply. And yes, somebody in Omaha has decided the stock finally looks cheap enough to buy. That “somebody” is now Abel.

Buffett, meanwhile, remains exactly where Berkshire wants him. Abel wrote in his first annual letter that Buffett is “in the office five days a week.” And Abel told CNBC on Thursday that Buffett still comes to the office every day and that the two stay in close contact. When Abel is in Omaha, Nebraska, they talk daily, and when Abel is traveling, he checks in on what Buffett is seeing and hearing.

The succession Berkshire is pitching is straightforward: a new CEO who calls the shots, and a mythological predecessor who still has office hours.

Abel has also reached for another megaphone to make his point loudly: his checkbook. A Form 4 filed with the SEC shows that the Gregory E. Abel Revocable Trust bought 21 Class A Berkshire shares on March 4 in a string of open-market purchases at prices ranging from $725,210.19 to $733,300 per share, taking the trust’s Class A holdings to 249 shares.

All of this sits atop the real Berkshire problem, the kind most CEOs would love to inherit: Berkshire’s cash and U.S. Treasury holdings are now over $370 billion, capital Abel described as both required ballast and “dry powder.” Big acquisitions are scarce at Berkshire’s scale, and markets haven’t exactly been offering diamonds at a discount. So buybacks are the cleanest way to turn patience into action when the best available investment is your own balance sheet.

Berkshire’s post-Buffett era is starting with the least glamorous, most Berkshire move imaginable: measure the business, decide whether the stock is cheap enough, and if yes, buy more of it. An old company using the cleanest tool it has to say the same thing it’s always said — just with someone new in charge.

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