In a year of record stock highs, artificial-intelligence moonshots and tense standoffs on global trade, Warren Buffett spent much of it watching, and waiting for the right moment to strike.

Buffett, one of corporate America's most-prolific -- and patient -- dealmakers, stuck to his script in his final year as Berkshire Hathaway's chief executive. With the market's rally limiting opportunities to make large acquisitions, Berkshire sold more stocks than it bought and stockpiled cash.

He further pared Berkshire's stake in Apple when tech stocks were still booming, and bought a petrochemical company with cash. But as the year drew to a close, it became clear Buffett's biggest move in 2025 was his May announcement, from the stage of Berkshire's annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., that he would cede his CEO post to Greg Abel at the end of the year. Even Abel was surprised by the timing.

"Warren exits in his final year having invested the same ways he did for six decades: patiently opportunistic and never placing the company in harm's way," said Chris Bloomstran, president and chief investment officer of Semper Augustus Investments Group, who has invested in Berkshire since 2000.

Americans have relied on Buffett's straight talk for decades to make sense of all manner of financial developments. In March, weeks before President Trump's taxes on imports set off a historic market crash, Buffett warned that his threatened tariffs amounted to an " act of war."

But after announcing his CEO tenure would end today, Buffett began to cede the spotlight. He told investors in his Thanksgiving letter last month that he is "going quiet" -- "sort of" -- and reiterated his confidence in Abel, Berkshire's vice chairman of noninsurance operations.

"Greg understands, for example, far more about both the upside potential and the dangers of our (property and casualty) insurance business than do a great many longtime P/C executives," Buffett wrote.

Not everyone is sticking around for what comes next. Berkshire's stock price is down more than 6% since he announced his departure. One of his key lieutenants, Geico CEO Todd Combs, is joining JPMorgan Chase. Longtime finance chief Marc Hamburg is retiring in June.

"When you don't have Buffett as the magnet, it gets to be more like a normal company" where people leave for other jobs or retire by their 70s, said Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust in Louisville, Ky., which holds Berkshire shares.

As others contemplated their post-Buffett futures in 2025, Buffett remained focused on Berkshire's.

There was one final multibillion-dollar acquisition. Berkshire agreed to pay $10 billion for Occidental Petroleum's chemicals producer OxyChem. Houston-based Occidental wanted to shrink its debt and Berkshire could offer cash, likely enabling Buffett to secure a discount, wrote Morningstar analyst Greggory Warren. For decades, purchases of attractively priced businesses have helped swell Berkshire profits.

Buffett sat on the sidelines during a big railroad merger in 2025 despite its position as one of the nation's dominant rail operators. Union Pacific's July agreement to acquire Norfolk Southern touched off speculation that Berkshire's railroad, BNSF, would participate in another wave of consolidation. But within days, Buffett had denied reports Berkshire was exploring its own deal with Norfolk, and later opted to form a new partnership with another railroad, CSX, rather than pursue an acquisition.

A more experimental Berkshire deal went sour in 2025 when packaged food giant Kraft Heinz announced it is splitting in two -- undoing a 2015 merger financed by Berkshire and private-equity firm 3G Capital. Buffett said in 2019 that he believed Berkshire and 3G had overpaid for Kraft Heinz.

Much of 2025 was spent waiting watchfully. As other investors bid up stocks and crypto, Buffett let Berkshire's cash pile swell to a record $358 billion. Berkshire sold $10 billion more in stocks than it bought in the first nine months of the year, putting 2025 on track to be the third year in the row in which Berkshire was a net seller of equities.

The sales included some of Berkshire's stock in Apple, a holding Buffett has referred to as one of Berkshire's four giants along with the firm's insurance empire, its massive energy business and BNSF. Berkshire bought its first shares of the consumer-electronics behemoth -- 57 million of them -- in 2016. From the end of that year through the end of 2024, Apple stock returned 834%.

This year Apple stock continued to climb, returning 9.5% through Tuesday. But as investors piled into tech, stoking fears of a bubble, Berkshire unloaded some of its Apple position, selling more than 60 million shares in the second and third quarters. Apple remains one of Berkshire's biggest holdings.

Buffett is famous for stockpiling cash when prices are too high for his liking -- then swooping in when bargains and other opportunities arise. During the 2008 financial crisis, Berkshire bailed out General Electric and Goldman Sachs.

Asked at this year's annual meeting about the growing cash pile -- and whether he was holding off on purchases ahead of the leadership transition -- Buffett said Berkshire was simply following that same time-tested playbook. He said he would not hesitate to spend $100 billion "when something is offered that makes sense to us."

"The one problem with the investment business is that things don't come along in an orderly fashion," he said. "It will happen again. But I don't know when. It could be next week, it could be five years off, but it won't be 50 years off.

"We will be bombarded with offerings that we'll be glad we have the cash for."