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Leadership
When is the right time to say goodbye? It’s the age-old question
Published February 2, 2026 in Leadership • 10 min read • 
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Performance, not age, should influence when older leaders step aside, argues Michael Skapinker
Warren Buffett didn’t feel old until he was 90. He started losing his balance and began having difficulty remembering names and reading the newspaper, he told the Wall Street Journal. In May 2025, at the age of 94, the world’s most celebrated investor called time on his leadership of Berkshire Hathaway, the insurance, energy, manufacturing, retail, and rail freight conglomerate he had led for 60 years. The company announced that 63-year-old Greg Abel would become chief executive at the start of 2026 while Buffett would remain as chairman.
A few months later, in September 2025, another corporate colossus, Rupert Murdoch, announced that his son, Lachlan, would inherit his empire upon his death, buying out three of his other children, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence, for $1.1bn each. The 94-year-old had relinquished the reins in 2023, stepping down as chair of Fox and News Corporation in favor of the then 52-year-old, but said he would “continue to be involved every day in the contest of ideas.”
Buffett and Murdoch aren’t the only CEOs to continue into old age. Giorgio Armani remained in charge of his eponymous empire until his death in September at the age of 91. Larry Ellison, executive chairman of Oracle, is 81.
Business chiefs staying on until they are older makes sense: people are living longer. The number of people worldwide who are 60 or older is expected to increase from a billion in 2020 to 1.4 billion in 2030 and 2.1 billion by 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
Official retirement ages are also rising as the population ages. While French politics has been rocked over plans to raise the pension age from 62 to 64, the UK’s current state pension age of 66 is scheduled to rise to 67 by 2028 and to 68 by 2046. Denmark is expected to have the highest pension age in Europe – 70 by 2040.
Is there a trend of older CEOs hanging on, in line with demographic and pension trends? The evidence is mixed. An analysis of CEO ages in 27 countries by Heidrick & Struggles shows little significant change. The average age of CEOs in 2025 was 57, compared with 56 in 2019. However, North American business leaders tend to be older. According to the global consulting firm Korn Ferry, in 2017, 35% of the CEOs of mid-sized and large US companies were over 60. By 2025, 42% were older than 60. As the US often leads in business trends, will other countries also see greater CEO longevity, and if so, is it a good idea?
Aging like fine wine?
Not necessarily. People age differently. Some are still fit for leadership as they grow older; others clearly aren’t. Buffett may have retained his sharpness until the age of 90 and Murdoch for even longer, but Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline at the age of 82 brought his presidential re-election bid to an abrupt end. Media mogul Sumner Redstone said he was going to live forever, only for a doctor to testify, when Redstone was 93, that he could no longer recognize simple shapes or colors.
Just as top executives are often required to undergo regular medical check-ups, they should have cognitive tests too. Provided they are still physically and mentally up to the job, what are the advantages and drawbacks of opting for an older boss? William Dawkins, who worked for nearly two decades as a senior headhunter at Spencer Stuart and Odgers Berndtson, says that whether organizations should hold on to older leaders depends on both the individual and the business.
“Is it in disruptive mode or looking for steady long-term growth?” If long-term growth is the aim, “it’s great to have someone who’s lived through a number of economic cycles,” Dawkins says. A younger chief executive may have experienced nothing but success, “which is a terrible disadvantage when you hit a financial crisis.”
Having led through ups and downs can enable an older CEO to draw on experience. Dawkins points to Jamie Dimon, now 69, the head of JPMorgan Chase, who shepherded the group through the great financial crisis and has continued to lead it ever since. “An older CEO has nothing to fear, doesn’t need to shoot the lights out to make their name. You might, in an older individual, get a level of calmness in a crisis.”
However, that long experience can be a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with disruption. “If you’re presiding over a business where the current model has been succeeding for many years, you’re unwilling to break it,” Dawkins says. Look at Kodak, which famously stuck to film in the face of all the evidence that picture-taking was going digital.
Leaders who won’t let go
Family businesses often have leaders who continue working well into their later years. Do they offer a template for non-family companies? I contacted Peter Vogel, IMD’s Professor of Family Business and Entrepreneurship and Director of the Global Family Business Center. He confirmed that family business heads tend to have longer tenures. One reason is that there are fewer governance structures pushing leaders to go – family companies often don’t have official retirement ages. Another reason is that owner-managers, who have devoted decades to building and growing their businesses, often struggle to let go.
An absence of pressure from outside investors can allow family business leaders to go on well beyond the traditional retirement age, Vogel said. “In families, it is rarely the case that there is someone who will be in a position to tell the patriarch or matriarch that it is time to step down and, in most cases, even if they were to ‘retire’, they would then often be pulling the strings from behind the scene because they remain the main shareholder or chairperson of the board.”
Like Dawkins, Vogel believes the benefit of leaders who stay for many years is that they take a longer view and benefit from decades of experience when it comes to crisis management. “A long-tenured CEO tends to pursue sustainable growth over short-term gains,” he said. “This can lead to stable investment patterns, strong stakeholder relationships, and a reputation for reliability.” They can also preserve the company’s values and culture. Their continued presence provides stability. “Frequent CEO turnover is disruptive and expensive,” he added.
“Overall, family firms also have the advantage of tacit, institutional knowledge with regard to how things are done or how crises are handled. Wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation. A luxury that non-family business CEOs rarely have.”
What of Dawkins’ point that those benefits can turn into disadvantages if the long-serving CEO fails to spot changes in technology or consumer behavior? Vogel points to research suggesting an inverse U-shape when CEOs spend a long time at the helm – performance improves in the early years but “can decline after too long in office, as learning plateaus and external perspectives diminish.”
In both family and non-family businesses, long-serving CEOs can become overly powerful, Vogel said, weakening board oversight. Their staying on can also result in talent bottlenecks. “When a CEO remains in place for decades, it may limit succession planning and discourage capable next-generation leaders from engaging or staying within the firm,” he added.
There are, of course, younger leaders who are shaking up the business world. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is 41. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is 40. Like Buffett and Murdoch, they built their companies. Whether they are still leading their organizations in 50 years depends on how successful those companies are over that very long term. That Buffett and Murdoch are more than twice the age of the younger business pioneers shows just how resilient they have been. Many more leaders have crashed out before they did, just as Murdoch came close to doing in the early 1990s.
Those nonagenarian business leaders are exceptional. There aren’t many of them. What we do know is that, with an aging population, companies will have more older leaders to choose from – and a few might prove to be outstanding.
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