Berkshire Hathaway's Letter to Shareholders

A rather special letter

"The Quiet Buffett"

On November 10, 2025, 95-year-old Warren Buffett released this special letter from Omaha.

It is unlike his usual annual letters to shareholders — it reads more like a farewell, a thank-you note, a letter written to time and to life itself.

He announced that he would no longer write Berkshire Hathaway's annual report or hold forth at the annual meeting, and, with a touch of British humour, said: "I'm 'going quiet' — sort of."

In the letter, Buffett looks back on his ninety-five years: from the 1938 appendicitis that nearly killed him to his sixty-four-year friendship with Charlie Munger; from childhood stories in small-town Omaha to his ultimate reflections on wealth, family, fate and kindness.

This is a centenarian-to-be's last long conversation with all of his "shareholders."

But what he talks about is not just money — it is how a life gets allocated:

the redistribution of time, love and luck.

He talks about luck, fate, ageing, inheritance, kindness, and the courage to choose your heroes.

The letter is both a century-long investor looking back and the farewell of an era. In what looks like a private letter, we see not only Buffett's life but also the art of reconciling capital with human nature.

Arcus42 has chosen to publish the letter in full — not to pay tribute to wealth, but to pay tribute to the kind of wisdom that stays clear-headed, restrained and humorous over a very long stretch of time.

Below is

our translation of the original. Here goes — enjoy:

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

News Release

For Immediate Release

November 10, 2025

Omaha, Nebraska (BRK.A; BRK.B)

Today, Warren E. Buffett converted 1,800 Class A shares into 2,700,000 Class B shares in order to give those B shares to four family foundations:

1,500,000 shares to The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation;

400,000 shares each to The Sherwood Foundation, The Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.

These gifts were delivered today.

Mr. Buffett's letter to shareholders:

To my fellow shareholders:

Starting this year, I will no longer write Berkshire's annual report or talk endlessly at the annual meeting. As the British would say, I'm "going quiet."

— Well, "sort of" quiet.

At the end of this year, Greg Abel will take over at the helm. He is an outstanding manager, a tireless worker and an honest communicator. Please wish him a long tenure.

I will still talk about Berkshire with you and with my children through my annual Thanksgiving letter. Berkshire's individual shareholders are a very special group who generously share their gains with others. I enjoy the chance to stay in touch. Allow me this year to reminisce a little first, then to discuss my plans for distributing my shares, and finally to share a few thoughts on business and life.

I. Memories

As Thanksgiving approaches, I am surprised and grateful to still be alive at 95. When I was young, that would not have looked like a winning bet. In fact, I nearly died early.

It was 1938, and Omaha's hospitals were naturally divided into "Catholic" and "Protestant" ones — a classification locals took entirely for granted.

Our family doctor, Harley Hotz, was a friendly Catholic who made house calls carrying a black bag. He called me "Skipper" and never charged much.

That year I came down with a bad stomachache. Dr. Hotz came over, examined me and said, "You'll be fine by morning." Then he went home, had dinner and played a little bridge.

But something kept nagging at him, and in the middle of the night he decided to send me to St. Catherine's Hospital for an emergency appendectomy. For the next three weeks I lived in a ward surrounded by nuns. I adapted quickly and rather enjoyed being "the one at the little podium." I liked to talk — yes, even back then — and the nuns were happy to listen.

Even more thrilling, my third-grade teacher, Miss Madsen, had each of the thirty kids in my class write me a letter. I probably threw away the boys' letters, but I read the girls' over and over. Being in hospital had its rewards.

During my recovery — the first week was actually quite dangerous — what delighted me most was a present from my Aunt Edie: a professional fingerprinting kit. I promptly fingerprinted every nun who looked after me. (I was probably the first Protestant child they had ever seen, and they didn't know what to expect.)

I had an absurd theory at the time: one day some nun would go astray, and the FBI would discover that it had never fingerprinted nuns. Americans in the 1930s idolised the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, and I fantasised that he would personally come to Omaha to inspect my "precious files," and that together we would crack the case and become famous nationwide.

Of course, the fantasy never came true. Ironically, years later it turned out that the person I should have fingerprinted was Hoover himself — he ended up disgraced for abusing his power.

That was Omaha in the 1930s. Back then, the treasures my friends and I dreamed of were sleds, bicycles, baseball gloves and electric trains.

Now let's look at a few people of that generation who grew up in Omaha — people I didn't know at the time but who later shaped me profoundly.

I'll start with Charlie Munger — my dear friend of sixty-four years.

In the 1930s, Charlie lived just one block from the house I bought in 1958 and still live in today.

We very nearly became friends early on — very nearly. In the summer of 1940, Charlie worked at my grandfather's grocery store, earning $2 for a 10-hour day (thrift is a Buffett family tradition). A year later I did similar work there, but we didn't meet until 1959 — he was 35 and I was 28.

After serving in World War II, Charlie graduated from Harvard Law School and settled in California. But he always said his early years in Omaha were the most formative. For more than sixty years he influenced me profoundly; he was the best of mentors and older brothers. We had disagreements but never an argument. "I told you so" was not in his vocabulary.

In 1958 I bought my first and only house. Naturally it was in Omaha — about two miles from where I grew up, less than two blocks from my in-laws, six blocks from the Buffett grocery store, and only a six- or seven-minute drive from the office where I have worked for 64 years.

Now another Omahan — Stan Lipsey. In 1968 he sold the Omaha Sun to Berkshire. Ten years later, at my invitation, he moved to Buffalo. At the time, Berkshire's Buffalo Evening News was fighting a morning paper — and losing ground steadily.

Stan eventually built our new Sunday paper, and for several early years it helped the once loss-making paper earn more than 100% a year (pre-tax) — a hugely important stream of money for Berkshire back then.

Stan's home was only five blocks from mine. One of his neighbours was Walter Scott Jr. You may remember that he brought MidAmerican Energy into Berkshire in 1999 and served as a director until his death in 2021. He was a philanthropic leader in Nebraska, and he left his mark on Omaha and the whole state.

Walter attended Benson High School, where I would have gone too — until my father unexpectedly defeated a four-term incumbent congressman in 1942. Life back then was full of surprises.

There's more.

In 1959, Don Keough's family lived across the street from me, barely a hundred metres from where the Mungers' old house had been. He was a coffee salesman then, but he was destined to become president of Coca-Cola and a loyal Berkshire director.

When we first met, he earned $12,000 a year; he and his wife Mickie had five children, all of them in pricey Catholic schools.

Our two families became good friends. Don grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa and graduated from Creighton University in Omaha. He married an Omaha girl, Mickie, early on. After joining Coca-Cola, he became a legend worldwide.

In 1985, Coca-Cola launched the ill-fated "New Coke." Don gave a famous speech apologising to the public and bringing back "Coca-Cola Classic."

He explained at the time that letters addressed to the "Supreme Idiot" were delivered straight to his desk. His "retraction speech" is a classic and can be found on YouTube. Don admitted frankly: "Coca-Cola really belongs to the public, not to the company." Sales soared afterwards.

You can watch his wonderful interview on CharlieRose.com (the episodes with Tom Murphy and Kay Graham are excellent too). Like Charlie, Don always remained an enthusiastic, friendly, unpretentious Midwestern boy.

Finally, there are Ajit Jain and Greg Abel — one from India, one from Canada — both of whom lived in Omaha for a few years in the late 20th century. In fact, in the 1990s Greg lived on Farnam Street, not far from my house, though we hadn't yet met.

Could there really be something magical in Omaha's water?

I lived in Washington, D.C. as a teenager (my father was serving in Congress then), and in 1954 I found what looked like a permanent job in Manhattan, New York.

There I received careful mentoring from Ben Graham and Jerry Newman and made friends for life. New York has a charm all its own — it still does.

Yet only a year and a half later, in 1956, I returned to Omaha and never wandered again.

My three children, and some of my grandchildren, all grew up in Omaha.

My children all went to public schools — the same school attended by my father (class of 1921), my first wife Susie (class of 1950), Charlie, Stan Lipsey, the Blumkin brothers (who built up Nebraska Furniture Mart) and Jack Ringwalt (class of 1923), founder of National Indemnity.

National Indemnity was sold to Berkshire in 1967 and became the cornerstone of our huge insurance business.

America has many great companies, schools and hospitals, each with its own particular strengths and talent. But I was lucky: I made lifelong friends, met both of my wives, got a sound foundation in public education, came to know many kind Omahans when I was young, and made wide-ranging friendships in the Nebraska National Guard.

In short, Nebraska is my home.

Looking back on my life, I believe Berkshire's success and mine are inseparable from our roots in Omaha. The geographic centre of America is a wonderful place to be born, to raise a family, to build a business. By pure luck, I drew a "ridiculously long straw" at birth.

II. On Age

Now let's talk about my advanced age.

My genes haven't been much help — before me, the longest-lived member of the family made it to 92 (and the further back you go in the family tree, the hazier such records get). But I've been lucky: from Dr. Hotz to this day, I have been cared for by smart, kind, dedicated Omaha doctors. They have saved my life at least three times, and their practices have all been within a few miles of my home. (I did give up fingerprinting nurses long ago, though. At 95 you can keep a few quirks, but there are limits.)

Living to an old age takes an enormous amount of luck: every day you have to dodge banana peels, natural disasters, drunk or distracted drivers, lightning — you name it.

But Lady Luck is fickle — no description fits better than "capricious and unfair." Many leaders and rich people receive far more than their share of good luck, and they are often unwilling to admit it. Heirs born into wealth gain lifelong financial independence at birth, while others struggle in hellish circumstances, or are robbed by physical or mental illness of everything I took for granted.

Had I been born in many of the world's other populous places, my life would very likely have been miserable, and my sisters' fates would have been even worse.

I was born in 1930, healthy, smart, a white male, and in America.

Wow! Thank you, Lady Luck.

My two sisters were just as bright and had better personalities, but the opportunities they faced were entirely different. Lady Luck visited me often throughout my life, but by my nineties she ought to be busy elsewhere — luck has its limits.

Father Time, on the other hand, has become increasingly interested in me.

And he has never lost — on his scoreboard, everyone is eventually marked down as a "win."

When your balance, eyesight, hearing and memory all start to steadily decline, you know he's nearby. I became "old" fairly late — ageing arrives at different times for different people — but once it arrives, there's no denying it.

What surprises me is that I feel fine overall. Although I move slowly and reading is hard, I still work in the office five days a week with a terrific team. Occasionally I still come up with a useful idea, or encounter an opportunity that wouldn't otherwise have come along.

Given Berkshire's size and market conditions, such ideas are getting rarer — but they're still not zero.

III. Distributing Wealth and Family Succession

My unusual longevity has inevitable and important consequences — both for my family and for achieving my philanthropic goals.

Let's talk about them.

Next Steps

My three children are all past normal retirement age — they are now 72, 70 and 67.

It would be a mistake to count on all of them slowing their ageing the way I have. To raise the odds that they finish distributing my estate before successor trustees take over, I need to speed up my lifetime gifts and put more Berkshire shares into each of their foundations.

They are now at their peak in experience and wisdom, but not yet truly old. This "honeymoon period" won't last forever.

Fortunately, this "course correction" is easy to carry out. But there is one more thing to consider: I want to keep a significant number of A shares until Berkshire's shareholders develop the same sort of trust in Greg that they had in Charlie and me. That day won't be long in coming. My children and Berkshire's directors are 100% behind Greg.

My children now have the maturity, wisdom, energy and instincts to handle enormous wealth. They will outlive me and, if necessary, can respond flexibly to future changes in tax law or philanthropic policy. The world keeps changing, and they must adapt too.

"Ruling from the grave" has never worked well, and I have never wanted to try it.

Fortunately, all three children inherited their dominant genes from their mother.

Over the years I've also become a better role model for them — though I'll never match their mother.

As a precaution, I have named three alternate trustees who can step in should a child die early or become incapacitated. The alternates are not ranked, and none is tied to a particular child. They are all excellent, worldly people with no conflicts of interest.

I've assured my children that they don't need to work miracles, nor fear failure or disappointment. These are part of life, and I've made plenty of mistakes myself.

They need only do a bit better than the average government programme or conventional philanthropy — after all, neither of those ways of redistributing wealth is perfect either.

In my early years I dreamed up all kinds of grand philanthropic plans. None of them were realistic. Over the years I've also watched plenty of failed attempts by political opportunists, family heirs and eccentric philanthropists.

If my children can do a "pretty good" job, their mother and I will be pleased.

Their judgement is sound, and for years they have practised allocating money in gradual increments — from small sums at first to more than US$500 million a year today.

They all love working long hours to help others — each in their own way.

IV. On Berkshire and Management

Speeding up my gifts does not mean my view of Berkshire's prospects has changed in any way.

Greg Abel has fully met the high expectations I had of him as my successor CEO. His understanding of the company's businesses and people far exceeds what I can now grasp, he learns extremely fast, and he often spots issues that an ordinary CEO would never even notice.

I can't think of a CEO, management consultant, academic or government official better suited to manage your savings and mine.

For example, he understands the potential and the risks of Berkshire's property and casualty insurance business more deeply than most veteran insurance executives.

I hope he enjoys good health and a long life. If our luck holds, Berkshire will need only five or six CEOs over the next hundred years.

We should particularly avoid choosing CEOs who are bent on retiring at 65, flaunting their wealth or building a family dynasty.

In reality, painful situations also arise:

a loyal, excellent CEO — whether of the parent company or a subsidiary — may develop dementia, Alzheimer's or some other long-term illness.

Charlie and I both ran into this and failed to act in time. That can be a major mistake. The board must stay vigilant, and the CEO must stay vigilant about the subsidiaries. Easier said than done, but my advice is: stay alert and be willing to speak up.

In the past, regulators tried to shame executives by requiring disclosure of the "ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay."

As a result, proxy statements ballooned from 20 pages to more than 100.

But good intentions didn't produce good results — they backfired.

What I've mostly observed is this: the CEO of Company A looks at the pay of the CEO of rival Company B and hints that he himself should be worth more.

Along the way he raises directors' pay too, and hand-picks the members of the compensation committee.

The new rules brought not restraint but one-upmanship.

The wealth spiral feeds itself.

What really bothers wealthy CEOs — they are human, after all — is not that they earn too little, but that others earn more.

Envy and greed always walk hand in hand.

I have never seen a consultant recommend a sharp cut in CEO or director pay.

Overall, Berkshire's mix of businesses is a little better than average, supported by a number of unrelated and extremely valuable "gems."

Still, ten or twenty years from now there will certainly be many companies outperforming Berkshire — the price of size is unavoidable.

Berkshire is about the least likely company I know of to suffer a catastrophic crisis.

Its management and board are also more shareholder-minded than nearly any company I know.

Moreover, Berkshire will always be run in a way that makes it an asset to the United States, never a dependant.

Over time our managers will become wealthy — they shoulder major responsibilities — but they have no wish to build dynasties or show off their wealth.

Our share price will keep fluctuating — during my sixty years in charge it has fallen by roughly 50% three times.

Don't despair — America always recovers, and Berkshire's stock will recover along with it.

V. Final Thoughts

Allow me a slightly self-indulgent remark: I feel better about the second half of my life than the first.

My advice: don't beat yourself up over past mistakes — learn something from them and move on.

It's never too late to become better. Find the right role models and copy them. You could start with Tom Murphy — he was the best.

Think of Alfred Nobel. As the story goes, when his brother died, a newspaper mistakenly printed Nobel's own obituary. Reading what the world thought of him shook him deeply, and he changed his life.

Don't wait for a newspaper mix-up to wake you up —

think about what you'd like your obituary to say, and then live a life worthy of it.

Greatness does not come from wealth, fame or power.

When you help others in thousands of ways, you make the world better.

Kindness is priceless, yet it costs nothing.

Whether or not you are religious, the Golden Rule (do not do to others what you would not want done to you) remains the best guide to behaviour.

I write these words knowing that I have been thoughtless and made mistakes countless times — but fortunately I have learned from many wonderful friends how to be a better person (though I'm still far from perfect).

Always remember: the cleaning lady and the chairman are equally human.

I wish everyone reading this letter a happy Thanksgiving.

Yes, even the "jerks"; it's never too late to change.

Please thank America — it has maximised our opportunities.

But remember too that its rewards are often handed out haphazardly, even unfairly.

Choose your role models carefully and strive to emulate them.

You can never be perfect, but you can always be better.

About Berkshire

Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries engage in diverse businesses, including insurance and reinsurance, utilities and energy, freight rail transportation, manufacturing, services and retailing.

The company's common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols BRK.A and BRK.B.

The End

Contact:

Marc D. Hamburg

402-346-1400

Arcus42 salutes those who choose to go "slower"

At Arcus42, we have always believed:

time is the fairest judge, and the long term is the gentlest force.

For individuals, families and businesses alike, true wealth succession comes from respecting time and safeguarding meaning.

As Buffett put it: "Lady Luck will eventually leave, but Father Time never fails to show up."

This early winter, we share this letter with all our fellow travellers who hold fast to long-termism and treasure kindness and reason. Author: Berkshire Hathaway Editor: Joyce Ma Translation: ChatGPT

That's all — thank you!

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