Warren Buffett exits Berkshire, leaving value investing's biggest legacy

Warren Buffett has retired as Berkshire Hathaway chairman, closing his formal chapter at the company. His exit spotlights a rare legacy of patient investing, plain advice and public trust.

In Short

• Buffett championed buying strong businesses cheaply and holding them with patience
• Berkshire’s annual meetings drew thousands for candid lessons on markets and life
• His humour and plain speaking widened his influence beyond professional investors

Warren Buffett, who retired as Berkshire Hathaway chairman on Friday less than a year after stepping down as chief executive, leaves behind a reputation as one of the world’s best-known investors and a public figure whose advice on life drew as much attention as his views on markets. Even in an era of algorithms, short attention spans and social media clips, Buffett continued to stand out for a patient style built on buying good businesses at low prices and waiting for value to emerge.

His approach helped Berkshire Hathaway outperform the broader US stock market for decades, while his plain speaking and humour turned the company’s annual shareholder meeting into a major draw. Buffett’s appeal, investors and academics said, went beyond wealth creation, with many seeing him as a guide to how to live as well as how to invest.

As Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive, Buffett became known for a methodical investing style: buy good businesses when they are cheap, stay out when prices are too high, and remain patient with carefully chosen investments. The idea is the basis of value investing, though it has often come under criticism when new market trends grip Wall Street, from dotcom shares in the late 1990s to gold when prices were hitting records earlier this year. Buffett, who has long been sceptical about gold as an investment, once said it “has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative.”

The investing world has had other big names, but few have entered the wider public imagination in the way Buffett did from Omaha, Nebraska. Many professional investors follow the same bargain-hunting style, but Buffett’s candour and humour helped him build a broader following. More than 40,000 people would gather at an Omaha arena on the first Saturday in May to hear Buffett and his longtime investing partner Charlie Munger, who died in 2023, discuss businesses, the news of the day and their own mistakes.

Todd Finkle, a retired professor who grew up in Omaha, knows Buffett’s children and wrote the book Warren Buffett: Investor and Entrepreneur, said: “Not a day goes by where what I’ve learned about Warren doesn’t affect me positively, both personally and financially.” Finkle said that when he brought students to meet the “Oracle of Omaha” for long question-and-answer sessions, Buffett did not begin with money. “He didn’t say anything about money. The first topic that he would always bring up is that the most important thing you’ll do in your life is to pick who to marry.”

Buffett also built a reputation for honesty and trust. After a scandal at Salomon Brothers, in which Berkshire Hathaway had an ownership stake, he became chairman and testified before Congress. He said employees were told: “After they first obey all rules, I then want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper to be read by their spouses, children and friends with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.”

That reputation, together with his patience as an investor, kept Buffett visible even in a fast-moving online age. Scammers used AI-generated videos that appeared to show him endorsing questionable investments or political candidates. On Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, where traders discuss possible quick gains through day trading in shares and options, users also know Buffett and his advice to “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”. Some memes there even joke about doing the opposite, using Buffett’s image to suggest that everyone should panic and sell.

Bob Miles, who has taught a college course on Buffett for 16 years, said many people first become interested in Buffett because of his wealth and the returns he generated for Berkshire shareholders. But that interest often deepens after reading his annual letters and hearing him in interviews. Through those, people came across lines such as: “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.” Buffett also said that “you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out”, meaning difficult periods quickly expose who has taken too much risk. On relationships, he said: “who you associate with is just enormously important. Don’t expect that you’ll make every decision right on that. But you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.” Miles said: “People associate him with successful investing, but I look at him more and more as kind of a guide toward how to live a successful life, whatever your talents happen to be.”

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, trips to Berkshire’s annual meetings were consistently in demand. “I don’t know of any time that it wasn’t popular,” said David Musto, a finance professor at the school and faculty director of the Jacobs Master of Science in Quantitative Finance. With Buffett stepping away, Musto said the obvious question is whether anyone can replace him as the world’s best-known value investor. While other prominent names remain, including Will Danoff at Fidelity Investments, who is retiring from day-to-day management at the end of the year, Musto said it is hard to find someone with Buffett’s combination of results, longevity, wit and personality.

Musto also said it is important for value investing to remain strong in a market where traders often chase meme stocks, obscure cryptocurrencies and other bets driven more by hopes of rising prices than by confidence in a good business at the right price. “It certainly helps to have people in the middle,” Musto said, “thinking about the value of a stock.” Buffett’s departure closes a long chapter in investing, marked not just by market success but by advice on judgment, patience and conduct that reached far beyond business.

With PTI Inputs

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