By Andy Serwer

As Warren Buffett exits the stage, it's reasonable to ask: Who will become the next ultimate sage of American business?

It's a timely question for a couple of reasons. First, we're coming up on Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting on Saturday, May 2, where for the first time in 60 years, Buffett, 95 -- arguably the leading voice of American business for decades -- won't be on stage leading the flock. Second, we're at the end of annual report season, with many of us having digested numerous letters to shareholders from Buffett-emulating CEOs.

Because Buffett's skill set is so multidimensional, filling his shoes is almost like replacing a combination of Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Wayne Gretzky.

First, yes, Buffett was the greatest investor of our time. Berkshire's annualized returns of 19.7% from 1965 through 2025, versus 10.5% for the S&P 500 index, will be nearly impossible to replicate.

Second, Buffett was a maestro allocator of capital. No one has been better at deciding between acquiring company X, investing in Y stock (or having Y company issue a special tranche of preferred), investing in Japan or Israel, plowing money into insurance operations, or buying back stock.

Third, Buffett is an underrated manager. He ran the eighth-largest company in America ($371 billion in revenue), which he single-handedly built, and oversaw some 387,800 employees worldwide. And fourth, Buffett became a modern-day Benjamin Franklin, dispensing wisdom that touches on ethics, philanthropy, marriage, sports, and even how to live your best life. He has become as close to a universally admired cultural icon as a businessperson could ever hope to be.

Sure, you'll have some leaders excel in one or two of these four categories -- but the whole Buffett ball of wax? Forget it. Which is why instead of trying to identify a single human as the next Buffett, we've assembled a portfolio of individuals, each drawn from one of these disciplines.

Let's start with investing. Lots of good choices here, such as Ken Griffin of Citadel, Tiger Cubs -- as Julian Roberston's protégés are called -- like Lee Ainslie of Maverick and Chase Coleman of Tiger Global, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, and Li Lu of Himalaya Capital, but to me Stan Druckenmiller of Duquesne stands out.

Druck, as he is known on Wall Street, would probably be the first to tell you he isn't as cuddly as Buffett. And I bet he wouldn't want to be called the next Warren Buffett, in part because at 72, Druckenmiller has been beating the market for 45 years. At this point, he isn't the "next" anybody.

Druck's record at Duquesne, a hedge fund that he turned into a family office in 2010, has been off the charts. He has famously never had a down year, while delivering annualized returns of 28.2% from 1981 through 2010. As a family office, Duquesne isn't required to report its performance like a hedge fund, but reportedly his subsequent numbers are equally stellar. Unlike Buffett, he's a macro, long/short investor, sometimes changing his mind on a dime, but his results are certainly Buffett-like, or better.

Stan doesn't do many interviews -- I did one with him in 1988 -- but earlier this year he sat down with Iliana Bouzali of Morgan Stanley for a chat that is worth watching. "I have this gift, and it's for compounding money," Druck says. "I really hate to lose. I'm just very driven." As of Dec. 31, Druckenmiller maintained big holdings in healthcare companies Natera, Insmed, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, as well as Amazon.com, and a new, bigger stake in the State Street Financial Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund. Remember too, Druckenmiller mentored Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the presumptive Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh.

Picking a top asset allocator is tricky. Certainly the business world will be closely watching Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, in this regard. Others to note include Mark Leonard, who has spectacular returns scooping up software businesses, though he stepped down from Constellation Software not long ago. Griffin deserves a nod here, too. But I'm selecting Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, a Canadian alternative-asset manager, with some $1 trillion of assets under management, which Flatt, 60, has led for 24 years. Brookfield's annualized total return to shareholders over the past 30 years has been 19%.

Simply put, Brookfield and Flatt "think different" from other private-equity or alternative investment firms. Brookfield, a complicated beast, is in the business of investing in and operating and improving companies in infrastructure, power generation, and real estate, rather than making leveraged bets in software, for instance, which has been vexing players in the business like Blue Owl Capital, Ares Management, and Thoma Bravo. Flatt has said he is particularly bullish on the American market these days because of its capital, energy, and technology, and is focusing on three trends: digitization, energy transition, and deglobalization.

Brookfield's stock, which had lagged behind during the go-go years of private credit a few years back, has raced ahead of its peers and the market over the past three years, up 117%, versus 68% for the S&P 500.

Making shareholder letters distinctive and a general-interest read is yet another contribution Buffett has made to American business, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out. And CEOs from Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase to Larry Fink of BlackRock to Satya Nadella of Microsoft have taken note. I would argue that most don't approach Buffett's level of lucidity and acuity. Almost all run too loooong for my taste, and some tend to repeat year to year (ahem, Jamie Dimon). Buffett's, while no 272-word Gettysburg Address, tended to be more succinct, or at least read that way.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's 2025 letter has some nuggets, but at 5,075 words, he might be wise to lean on Jeff Bezos' iconic Day 1 letter from 1997, which comes in at 1,617 words. As for Dimon's dissertation, it's tough to calculate a word count because of all of the charts and graphs, but suffice it to say, at 49 pages, including two pages of 68 footnotes, it's weighty. Fink's opus contains insightful material on capital markets in countries around the world, but at 9,053 words, let's just say it was tough to get through in one sitting

Brevity, gentlemen! Brevity!

My pick as all-star letter-writer -- he's a pretty fair hand at investing, too -- is Howard Marks, co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, but he isn't exactly concise either. (Oaktree, lo and behold, happens to be owned by Brookfield.) Unlike the others, though, Marks writes his now-famous memos whenever something strikes his fancy, which began with a single two-page missive in 1990 and now appear at the rate of some half a dozen or so a year. Marks is smart to break up his text with bullet points and boldface, but much more than that, he has elevated himself with his pithy writing and insight. As Buffett himself once said: "When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they're the first thing I open and read. I always learn something."

My two favorite Marksisms are: "No bad assets, only bad prices." And, "Experience is what you got when you didn't get what you wanted."

I saw Marks speak at a private club in New York in March before a rapt group, and followed up with him to ask him to elaborate on three points he made:

-- Data isn't necessarily information, and information isn't necessarily knowledge. "Real understanding is drawing an inference," Marks told me. "I strongly believe that Buffett's approach was never, 'I'm going to know every fact about this company.' His approach was, 'I'm going to figure out what matters with this company, and I'm going to achieve a superior appreciation of that.' And Charlie Munger always used to say that the goal is not some amassing of data points."

-- The S&P 500 has unappreciated risks. "The market capitalization concentration in the top stocks at 40% is unprecedented, I think," he says. "There are also fewer industrial companies now with different financials. And the very phenomenon of indexing for the last 50 years probably has an effect on the S&P itself. Demand is increasing and supply isn't."

-- Taxing wealth is bad. "I don't think taxing wealth is evil, per se," Marks says. "It just depends on the amount. If you tax something at 1% and you change the rate to 2%, your tax revenues might almost double. But if you change it from 2% to 20%, your revenues are probably not going to go up 10 times. And if you take it from 20% to 80%, your revenues may go down because people can move. When tax rates become, shall we say, confiscatory, people will respond."

As for the best manager, there are two ways of looking at this. One is parsing a group of CEOs who generally seek to emulate Buffett's strategy of combining insurance and investment operations, as described by my colleague Andrew Bary. Here you have names like Tom Gayner of Markel Group and Prem Watsa of Fairfax Financial Holdings. Second is handicapping all-star CEOs like Jamie Dimon, Apple's Tim Cook, and Satya Nadella. In other words, choosing between a CEO steeped in the Buffett Way, or someone who's produced sustained outperformance at a huge company, like what Buffett has done at Berkshire.

To me it came down to Nadella and Watsa. Nadella resurrected Microsoft, which actually has a fairly diverse portfolio of B2B and consumer businesses, and elevated it to the apex of American commerce. Since becoming CEO in February 2014, Microsoft's stock has delivered a compound annual growth rate of 22%.

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April 17, 2026 21:31 ET (01:31 GMT)

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