BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY ANNUAL MEETING

The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting is a company’s meeting of its shareholders, held in early May in the arena in Omaha. For most of a Saturday the people who run the company answer questions from the floor, and shareholders come from all over the world to listen.

It has been called Woodstock for capitalists, and nothing better has been found.

The Lunchroom

For years the meeting was held in the lunchroom of National Indemnity, one of the company’s insurers in Omaha, and a dozen or two people came.

It moved as it grew: to a hotel, a concert hall, the Orpheum Theater, a convention centre, the Civic Auditorium, and in the early 2000s to the city’s new arena. By 2015 more than forty thousand came, and in 2017 Guinness recorded it as the largest annual general meeting in the world.

For most of those years the questions were answered by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, side by side, for five hours and more.

Munger died in 2023, at ninety-nine.

The Handover

In January 2026 Buffett gave up the chief executive’s title to Greg Abel, and that May the meeting was Abel’s to run.

It opened with a film of sixty years of meetings. Abel retired ceremonial shirts for Buffett and Munger, as a team retires a player’s number, and took the questions with the people who run the businesses.

Buffett, who remains chairman, sat on the floor with the board and listened. The arena was a little over half full when it began.

What to Know

A single share brings up to four credentials, free by post or for a few dollars online.

Friday is for shopping. The exhibition hall of Berkshire’s companies opens at noon, and See’s Candies, Fruit of the Loom and Nebraska Furniture Mart sell to shareholders.

Saturday’s doors open at seven, and the good seats go in the first minutes. Sunday brings a five-kilometre run and shopping at Borsheims. There is a newspaper-throwing contest, with Dairy Queen ice creams for prizes.

There is no dress code, and the arena is dressed for a Saturday in Nebraska. A lounge suit is never wrong.

Omaha has too few hotel rooms for the weekend. Council Bluffs is across the river.

The mistake is to come only for Buffett. He no longer runs the meeting, and the people who do are the reason to listen now.

The Court

The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting is not the Court’s own. Credentials come with a single share, which is the member’s own affair, and the Court arranges the whole of the weekend: getting there, where to stay in a city with too few rooms, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.