The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting opens Saturday morning at the CHI Health Center in Omaha. This is the first meeting in sixty years where Warren Buffett is not running the show. Vice Chairman Greg Abel took over as CEO at the start of the year and is running his first solo session as the principal voice on stage. Buffett, ninety five, is on the floor but not on the stage. The format runs one hour of presentation followed by two and a half hours of question and answer.
The cash position is the headline number. Berkshire is sitting on $325 billion in cash and short term Treasuries, a record for the company and a record for any non bank corporation in the United States. The cash pile has grown for nine straight quarters, which means the company has been a net seller of stocks across that span. The last large acquisition was Alleghany Corporation in 2022. That gap is the longest stretch without a major deal since the late 1990s.
Berkshire shareholders show up at this meeting differently than shareholders at any other public company. Roughly 35,000 people are expected on site, with another 80,000 watching the CNBC livestream. Class B shares trade around a market capitalization that puts Berkshire among the top eight US companies by value. BRK.B is up 9 percent year to date, which beats the S&P 500 by a small margin. The B shares are the practical entry point for retail holders since the Class A shares trade above $700,000 per share.
Abel will face questions on three threads. The first is capital allocation. With $325 billion in cash earning roughly 4.4 percent in Treasury yields, the company collects about $14 billion a year in interest income alone. Shareholders want to know what conditions would trigger a large acquisition or a return of capital through buybacks. The second thread is succession beyond Abel. Ajit Jain runs insurance, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler run the public equity portfolio, and the question is how long this configuration holds.
The third thread is the operating businesses. BNSF Railway, Geico, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and the manufacturing portfolio together generate the operating earnings that have always been the real story underneath the equity portfolio. Geico has been gaining auto insurance market share for six straight quarters after losing share to Progressive through 2022 and 2023. BNSF intermodal volumes are up 4.7 percent year over year through April. Berkshire Hathaway Energy capital expenditure runs at roughly $7 billion annually for grid modernization.
Buffett is expected to make remarks but the format change is significant. Charlie Munger died in late 2023, ending the dual stage tradition that defined the meeting for forty years. Buffett ran the 2024 meeting alone and ran the 2025 meeting alone. Saturday is the first meeting where Abel runs the question session and Buffett supplements rather than leads. The body language is the substance for many longtime shareholders.
The annual letter, released in late February, took a different tone than recent years. Buffett wrote about the difficulty of finding scale opportunities at acceptable prices. He noted that Berkshire owns a percentage of every American business through its index exposure and that the company is positioned to be patient. He did not provide guidance on the cash deployment timeline. Analysts have read this as a signal that the cash buildup may continue for several more quarters.
Volume in BRK.B over the past five sessions averaged 4.8 million shares, roughly thirty percent above the trailing six month average. Options activity has been concentrated in May and June expirations with strikes near the current spot price. The implied volatility on Berkshire options remains low compared to the broader market because the company tends to trade as a defensive name. Bond holders pay attention because Berkshire issues investment grade debt periodically and is rated AA by S&P.
The meeting matters for retail investors who use Berkshire as a long term core holding rather than as a trading vehicle. The narrative on Saturday will be about whether Abel can carry the cultural weight of the meeting without softening the discipline that defined the Buffett era. The company has not historically delivered guidance, has not provided quarterly forecasts, and has not changed its capital allocation philosophy because of stock price action. Whether that posture survives the leadership transition is the long question that will be answered over years rather than in one meeting.