Those who have followed Berkshire Hathaway have long-anticipated that the day would come when legendary investor and CEO Warren Buffett called it quits.
But the news came unexpectedly at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, as the 94-year-old Oracle of Omaha waited until the end of the event to announce he would step down at year’s end and would officially recommend Greg Abel to take his place.
The board approved the plan, naming Abel as Berkshire’s next CEO when Buffett steps down at the end of this year, CNBC reported Monday. Buffett will remain the company’s executive chairman.
Naming Abel, a 25-year veteran of Berkshire, as his successor was not exactly surprising news. Buffett said in May 2021 that Abel would be next in line to lead the $1.1 trillion conglomerate.
“The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett told CNBC at the time.
Abel, 62, currently serves as the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy and vice-chairman of non-insurance operations.
The Edmonton, Alberta-born businessman will take over as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO in 2026. No pressure: The guy Abel is replacing is the world’s most famed investor, who delivered a 5,500,000% return to investors during his tenure.
Finding his way to Berkshire
Unlike Buffett, who started investing at the age of 11, Abel didn’t get an early start to a career in business while growing up in Edmonton.
Buffett has called Abel “a proud Albertan” and that his Edmonton roots come out when he speaks to the board of directors at management meetings. “They know he came from Canada. They know he likes hockey and they know his Uncle Sid (Abel of the Detroit Red Wings) was a hell of a hockey player,” Buffett said in a video from the University of Alberta, which honored Abel in 2013 as a distinguished alumnus after he graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
Abel’s professional career began at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Edmonton, before moving to the company’s San Francisco office. In 1992, he joined CalEnergy, a utilities company run at the time by David Sokol, who himself was once considered the top candidate to succeed Buffett.
In 1998, CalEnergy acquired Des Moines, Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy Holdings (which was renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014) for $4 billion, and at the request of Sokol, Abel became president of the combined companies under MidAmerican’s name.
In 2000, an investor group that included Berkshire Hathaway, Sokol, Abel and Walter Scott — a former Berkshire Hathaway director and major shareholder in MidAmerican — acquired the electric and natural gas utility company and took it private.
Buffett had tapped Sokol to turn around the failing Berkshire subsidiary NetJets in 2009, leaving Abel to step up in Sokol’s place as MidAmerican’s next CEO. For years, Buffett praised both Abel and Sokol as “brilliant managers” and “huge assets” to Berkshire.
(Sokol would later resign after it was disclosed he made a questionable investment in specialty chemical company Lubrizol, which he had recommended Berkshire purchase for about $9.7 billion.)
MidAmerican would be renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014 with Abel leading 11 subsidiaries.
Abel would join Berkshire’s board of directors in 2018 and lead the non-insurance operations. He continues to reside in Des Moines, where Berkshire Hathaway Energy is still headquartered.
A ‘more active’ leader
During the Saturday shareholder meeting’s afternoon Q&A session, CNBC host Becky Quick fielded a question for Abel to describe his approach in dealing with Berkshire’s subsidiaries compared to Buffett’s.
Before Abel could answer, Buffett interjected wryly with his own answer: “better.”
But Abel answered the question by describing himself as “more active, but hopefully in a very positive way.”
“You really need someone that behaves well on top and is not playing games for their own benefit, and we get a lot of managers that bend over backward to not do that sort of thing and then we get some that bend forward,” Buffett said. “Greg does something about it and I’ve generally been lax in doing something about it.”
Praise in Abel’s abilities hasn’t just come from Buffett.
In an interview with CNBC in February 2023, former Berkshire vice-chairman Charlie Munger described Abel as “just sensational at being a business leader, both as a thinker and as a doer. And he’s also sensationally good at smoothly getting things done through other people. So, he’s a very remarkable human being and Berkshire is very lucky to have him.”
Munger also called Abel “a tremendous learning machine” and that one could “argue that he’s just as good as Warren in learning all kinds of things.” In 2021, Munger said, “Greg will keep the culture.”
Abel says he learned how to be curious from observing Buffett. That curiosity helps in understanding how Berkshire’s businesses run.
“Warren talks about the curiosity being important as you go through things. That would be my style, to have questions and comments around their business, their frameworks,” Abel said.
He’s already received approval from some Berkshire board members.
“Greg is ready. I have no doubt about it. We’ve known it for a long time,” Ron Olson, who has been a Berkshire board member since 1997, told CNBC on Saturday after Buffett’s announcement. “People don’t realize that, since 2018, he has been learning the businesses that we have.”
While it’s unclear if Abel can handle seeing his face plastered on various merchandise like Buffett has enjoyed for 60 years, he got an encouraging comment Saturday from another high-profile CEO of a company that Berkshire has long admired.
“There’s never been someone like Warren, and countless people, myself included, have been inspired by his wisdom. It’s been one of the great privileges of my life to know him,” Apple CEO Tim Cook posted on X. “And there’s no question that Warren is leaving Berkshire in great hands with Greg.”
CNN’s Luciana Lopez, Robert Ilich and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.
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