Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway chairman after over 50 years

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  How to Retire a Capitalist King Without Robbing the Kingdom

  A famed investor’s graceful exit from his own empire shows how self-interest, disciplined by justice and the impartial spectator, can arrange succession without sacrificing the public.

  A man who has presided over the same great commercial empire since 1970, and served it, as he himself says, since 1965, now lays down the chair and takes up the gentler dignity of chairman emeritus. His company is immense, its value numbered, I am told, in the thousands of billions of your dollars, and his impact on it and its owners is described by his colleagues as without parallel. Such phrases should always awaken suspicion; praise is cheapest when it is costless. Yet the fact remains: a single directing mind has shaped a vast conglomerate for more than half a century, and has at last contrived to leave it standing without himself upon the stage.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  Warren Buffett’s Exit Shows How Long Power Can Last Without Becoming Tyranny

  A boardroom monarchy can be tolerable when it is openly fiduciary, continually consented to, and relinquished without a struggle for absolute power.

  That a single man should preside as chairman over one great trading company for more than fifty years would, in my own century, have sounded like a species of commercial monarchy; that he should depart it at ninety‑six, become something styled an emeritus, and hand the chair to his son, would have raised grave suspicions of a disguised inheritance of power. Yet the reports before us speak, not of tumult or accusation, but of a deliberate succession, long prepared, with another trusted officer already acting as chief executive and a board publicly commending the founder’s impact upon the owners. I am moved, therefore, to ask what makes such a concentration of power tolerable, when in politics it would be intolerable.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Warren Buffett Shows How a Wise Prince Abdicates

  By turning Berkshire Hathaway into an armed republic of habits rather than a court of flatterers, Buffett prepares it to outlive his own fortune and his own fame.

  A man of ninety-six who still chooses his own exit is already teaching a lesson. Warren Buffett steps down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway after holding the post since 1970 and serving the company since 1965. He does not leave in disgrace, in illness, or amid panic, but becomes chairman emeritus with a prepared statement from Greg Abel praising an impact “without parallel in the history of American business.” This is not the language of a palace coup. It is a public ritual of continuity. The effectual truth is simple: the old prince walks out upright, smiling, and hands the keys to his own design. Few rulers manage even that.

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