Warren Buffett’s 2025 Thanksgiving letter: Takeaways for Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett says he’s “going quiet. Sort of.” But his 6,000-word Thanksgiving letter proves he still has plenty to say.

Buffett has announced that he plans to step down as CEO at the end of the year — Greg Abel is set to take over — but at 95, the Oracle of Omaha is at the office five days a week, still doing what he has always done best: telling a story that sounds like a memoir but doubles as a master class in staying power. The letter, which is how Buffett plans to communicate with shareholders moving forward, is full of wry humor and Midwestern warmth. It feels less like a goodbye than a passing of the torch — gratitude, good sense, and a reminder that the world’s most famous investor still writes like the next-door neighbor who can’t resist turning every anecdote into an allegory.

Buffett opens with nostalgia — the 1938 appendectomy that almost killed him, a fingerprinting spree on nuns, and a lifetime of Omaha luck that kept him rooted in the city that built his myth — before easing into the business of legacy. Buffett’s genius has always been the same: He can make balance sheets sound like bedtime stories and still sneak in a life lesson before dessert.

“I have been extraordinarily fortunate,” Buffett writes, before shifting to the business of keeping that fortune organized.

In the letter, Buffett says he’ll stop writing the annual report and step back from the marathon Q&A at the shareholder meeting, but he’s not stepping out of Berkshire. He says he’ll keep a “significant amount” of Class A shares until shareholders have the same comfort with the company’s next chapter that he and Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger, who died last year, did. The signal is one of continuity of ownership while the day-to-day spotlight moves elsewhere. It’s a transition in tone, not a transfer of conviction. Buffett isn’t leaving the stage; he’s just dimming the lights.

The first hard number in the letter is philanthropic, not financial. Buffett announced a new wave of giving: 1,800 Class A shares, worth roughly $1.3 billion, converted into 2.7 million Class B shares and donated to four family foundations. In the letter, he says that he wants his children (all in or around their 70s) to allocate capital while they’re still in their prime and can adapt to the world as it is, not as he imagined it decades ago. “Ruling from the grave does not have a great record,” he writes. He adds that the donation “in no way reflects any change in my views about Berkshire’s prospects.”