What I Learnt from Warren Buffett in Berkshire's 2026 AGM

Good afternoon everyone!

The 2026 Berkshire Hathaway AGM happened over the weekend, and it was the first time in 60 years that Warren Buffett wasn’t running the show, but Greg Abel, the new CEO.

It was a smaller crowd, but one would not miss the OG sitting on the arena floor with the other directors wearing a cute purple sweater.

Greg Abel ran the meeting and laid out his vision for the post-Buffett era. Then during the lunch break, Warren himself sat down with Becky Quick from CNBC and said more useful things in 30 minutes than most finance influencers say in a year.

I spent the weekend watching it, jotting down notes and documenting it all in this post so you don’t have to.

And I think you will find an immense amount of value from it, just like I did. So let’s get to it.

This was Abel’s first AGM as CEO, and while a lot of people came to see how he’d handle the pressure, what he actually delivered was a clear, no-drama vision for the next chapter of Berkshire.

The most quoted moment of the meeting was Abel saying just two words.

A shareholder asked: is there ever a point where Berkshire should break itself up? Modernise. Restructure. Get more dynamic now that a new CEO is in.

Abel said two words.

“Absolutely not”.

No reinvention. No new era pivot. No strategic overhaul to mark his arrival. The theme of the meeting was literally “The Legacy Continues”.

I love this. Because it goes against everything our generation has been taught about leadership. The pressure is always to disrupt. Pivot. Rebrand. Show people you’re doing something different.

Abel just said: what we have works. We’re not going to break it because I’m sitting in a different chair now. If there isn’t a problem, don’t fix it.

Same lesson for your portfolio. You don’t tear apart a working strategy because you got bored. You don’t abandon your DCA because the market had a red week. You don’t pivot to “trading” because you saw some random peep made $5,000 last Friday.

When something is compounding for you, your job is to leave it alone.

“The ABCs, the arrogance, bureaucracy, complacency that can creep into a company, will kill a company. And we intend to never allow that to happen.”

I find this interesting because even tho he was referring to the Berkshire’s portfolio of companies, it applies to us as investors too.

Arrogance kills portfolios. The investor who thinks he can time the market. The one who got lucky once and now thinks he’s a genius.

Bureaucracy kills portfolios. Too many positions. Too many strategies running at once. Too much complication for no extra return.

Complacency kills portfolios. The investor who hasn’t reviewed their holdings in 3 years. The one who stopped learning because they think they already know enough.

Abel was talking about Berkshire. But he was also describing exactly how most retail investors fail.

One more thing worth flagging. Abel revealed he’s putting his entire after-tax salary, $15 million a year, back into Berkshire shares. And plans to keep doing it every year for as long as he’s CEO.

That’s skin in the game.

That’s a leader who isn’t just running the company. He’s betting his own paycheck on it.

This is exactly what we look for when we invest in any business. What is management doing with their own money? Are they buying their own stock or quietly selling it? Are they aligned with shareholders or just collecting a paycheck?

Abel just answered that question for the next decade.

Here’s the one that caught everyone off guard.

Abel opened the Q&A session by playing a video of Warren Buffett asking the first question. Except it wasn’t really Warren. It was an AI deepfake. Made with no input from the actual Buffett.

The real Warren, sitting in the audience, was watching a fake version of himself ask Greg a question on stage.

Abel used it to make a point about AI cybersecurity risk. He said this is exactly the kind of thing Berkshire is now managing every day, especially across its insurance businesses.

But the deeper point landed for me later.

The casino isn’t just on your phone anymore. It’s getting more sophisticated by the month. Fake gurus. Fake screenshots. Fake confidence dressed up as financial advice.

Which makes the boring thing, the patient thing, the quality and time thing, more important than ever.

There was another quiet line from Abel that didn’t get much airtime but matters a lot.

He said Berkshire is “not anxious to deploy capital into subpar opportunities”. And that the firm’s massive cash pile means they’re “not beholden to anyone”.

Translation: we’re not going to chase deals just because we have the money. We’re going to wait for the right pitch, even if it takes years.

This is the same Buffett discipline that we’ve know.

He added: “There will be dislocations in markets that again will allow us to act.”

He doesn’t know when. Nobody does. But Berkshire is built to be ready when it happens.

Not predicting when the storm comes (no one can). Just making sure you’re built to survive and act when it does.

While Abel was running the show, Warren slipped out for 30 minutes with Becky Quick from CNBC. And the conversation was vintage Buffett.

He didn’t talk about specific stocks. He didn’t make predictions. He just zoomed out and reminded us how to think.

Becky asked him about the valuations of the market. What investors should be thinking right now.

Buffett said this:

The American economy is like a cathedral. The cathedral of all cathedrals. But attached to it is a casino. And people can freely walk back and forth between the two.

He said there are still more people in the church than in the casino.

But the casino has gotten very attractive.

Then he dropped the line that did the rounds.

“We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now.”

The casino is louder than it’s ever been. And the worst part is, sometimes the casino pays out. Just often enough to keep people walking back in.

But what followed next is, in my opinion, is perhaps the simplest and most overlooked truth Warren has ever said.

He said betting against the house does not work. But buying a quality stock and letting it compound your wealth does.

Investing today is 10x harder than 10 years ago. And it’s not because of the lack of information, but because of how social media has made it seem like it’s so easy to make money. Screenshots of one-day options trades, the allure of prediction markets, memecoins, and Tiktok videos about turning $500 into $50,000 in a week.

It makes you feel like it’s soooo easy to be rich. But that itself is a bias because out of the 1 who succeed, there are 9 who fail - and who wants to share their failures openly?

What Warren is reminding us is that the cathedral is still there. Quiet. Boring. Compounding every single year for anyone patient enough to stay seated.

$397 billion.

That’s how much cash Berkshire is sitting on. A record.

When Becky asked him why, he basically shrugged. He said this isn’t the ideal environment. Prices are too high.

Then he followed up by saying in his 60 years of investing, only about five of them were really juicy.

5 out of 60.

The greatest investor of all time, sitting on nearly $400 billion, says the right move right now is mostly to do nothing. He’s waiting for the moment when the market collapses and “no one answers the phone”.

For most retail investors, doing nothing feels like failure. We’ve been trained to believe that being a good investor means always making moves. Always finding the next thing. Always rotating. Always positioning.

But Warren is showing us the opposite. Doing nothing IS doing something. You don’t have to swing at every pitch. The market will throw you a fat one eventually. Your only job is to still be standing at the plate when it does.

A lot of Berkshire’s biggest holdings have new CEOs coming in, with the most notable one being Apple’s Tim Cook is stepping down.

Is that a problem?

Warren basically said no. Great companies survive transitions. The good ones have systems, culture, and momentum that outlast any single leader.

Using Apple as the example, when Steve Jobs passed, nobody knew if Tim Cook could fill those shoes. Today, the $35 billion Berkshire invested in Apple is worth $185 billion including dividends.

The lesson? Don’t sell a great business just because the founder steps down. Watch what the new leader does. Watch the culture. Watch the numbers.

This is also a quiet message about Berkshire itself. Warren is essentially saying: I’m doing what I’ve always told you to do. Trust the system, not the person.

Warren is 95. He’s watched seven decades of markets. The dot-com bubble. The GFC. COVID. Crypto. Meme stocks. Every flavour of mania humans can cook up.

And his core message hasn’t changed in any meaningful way.

Pick quality. Be patient. When you don’t see anything you understand, do nothing. The American economy keeps compounding. Time is your friend if you stay long enough to let it work.

The people who quietly build real wealth aren’t the ones who had the best year. They’re the ones who kept showing up to the cathedral for thirty years while everyone else was changing tables in the casino.

That’s it. That’s the whole game.

And always remember -

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