5 Things to Know About Warren Buffett's Stunner

Warren Buffett stunned the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway over the weekend by announcing that he would step down as CEO at the end of the year.

• Not fully retiring: The 94-year-old softened the blow by saying he would stay on as chairman to offer guidance on future acquisitions or other big moves. "I could be helpful, I believe, in that in certain respects, if we ran into periods of great opportunity or anything," he said. This is likely why Berkshire shares were down only by a modest 2% early Monday, reports CNBC.

• Next CEO: Buffett's successor as CEO will be 62-year-old Greg Abel, a current vice chairman, and the Wall Street Journal looks at his challenge in filling a monumental pair of shoes. "He would make a huge mistake trying to be Warren Buffett, and he knows that," Will Danoff of Fidelity tells the newspaper. The reason is because Buffett is no mere investor. "His unique stature allows him to confer legitimacy on damaged businesses in times of crisis—as he famously did when Wall Street veered toward potential collapse—and to extract a good deal for his shareholders in the process," per the Journal.
• Buffett's mark: Over six decades, Buffett has changed the way generations of investors think with what a Dealbook analysis in the New York Times calls a "deceptively simple" strategy known as value investing. The concept existed long before Buffett, but he came to embody the principle of investing for the long term. "One of America's largest railroads? Owned by Berkshire. The biggest shareholder in American Express and Coca-Cola? Berkshire, too."
• Amazing year: As anyone who has checked their 401(k) knows, this has been a challenging year for the stock market. The benchmark S&P 500 is off about 3%—and yet Berkshire is up roughly 20%, reports Axios. That has Buffett's final year on track to be his best against the index in nearly 20 years.
• His fortune: The Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegs Buffett's net worth at $169 billion, making him the fifth richest person in the world. But what's unusual is that Buffett is among the few billionaires whose net worth has actually increased this year, notes Bloomberg. It's up nearly $27 billion.

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