Abel’s first letter as CEO is, on its face, a continuity document. He writes that the prior month he “sent a letter to our employees to emphasize that Berkshire’s culture and values remain unchanged and will continue into perpetuity.” He lists a partnership attitude toward shareholders, a decentralized model “with autonomy grounded in deserved trust,” integrity, a “fortress-like balance sheet,” capital discipline, risk management with the CEO as chief risk officer, and operational excellence. He says decisions stay with managers closest to the business, without “layers of bureaucracy” or “short-term earnings expectations dictated to them.”
Capital-allocation rules in that letter are the old ones restated: understand the business; partner with high-integrity owner-managers; avoid businesses that could jeopardize reputation; act quickly and concentrate; let compounding work; repurchase stock only below a conservative intrinsic-value estimate; pay no cash dividend so long as more than one dollar of market value is reasonably likely to be created by each dollar retained. Cash and U.S. Treasuries, he wrote, then exceeded $370 billion and were “dry powder,” not a retreat from investing. “We will always aim for ownership of productive businesses over U.S. Treasuries.”
Insurance remains “our core.” Ajit Jain is praised by name as peerless on large risks. The concentrated U.S. equity list in the letter is still Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody’s. The five Japanese trading houses — Mitsubishi, ITOCHU, Mitsui, Marubeni, Sumitomo — are described as “comparable to our major U.S. holdings in importance and long-term value creation opportunity,” with year-end 2025 stakes and cost bases printed in the letter. That Japan program began under Buffett years earlier; Abel’s letter treats it as core, not as a new idea of 2026. Later secondary accounts of 2026 Japanese filings that nudged some stakes over 10 percent are reporting of a continuation, not a primary rewrite of the thesis.
Governance continuity is in the proxy as well as the letter. Buffett remains chairman, in the office five days a week, “available to us as we underwrite insurance, operate our non-insurance businesses, and deploy capital including equity investments.” Abel writes that equity-investment responsibility “ultimately resides with me as CEO,” with Ted Weschler managing about 6 percent, including a portion formerly overseen by Todd Combs. The annual-meeting format — unscripted questions, Becky Quick moderating remote questions — is expressly kept. Abel says he will not offer quarterly commentary. The 2026 proxy’s board still rejects a human-capital reporting proposal on the same decentralization theory Berkshire has used for years.
OxyChem and Bell Laboratories, announced in 2025 while Buffett was still CEO, appear in Abel’s letter as examples of the same acquisition filter, not as a new doctrine. They belong on the continuity list because Abel presented them that way.