Investors had speculated in recent years that Warren E. Buffett might eventually retire. But the 94-year-old billionaire still surprised many on Saturday, when he announced that he planned to step down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway after nearly six decades.
Less surprising is who he said he intended to succeed him as the leader of the $1.1 trillion conglomerate he built: Gregory E. Abel, his yearslong heir apparent.
Who is Greg Abel?
Since 2018, Mr. Abel, 62, has been vice chairman of Berkshire’s non-insurance companies, the 189 operating businesses that include the BNSF railroad, one of the nation’s largest; Berkshire Hathaway Energy, a giant power utility; restaurant chains and retailers like Dairy Queen and the Borsheims jewelry chain; consumer brands such as Fruit of the Loom underwear, Brooks running shoes and Justin Boot; NetJets, the private jet service; and more.
Mr. Abel’s vast responsibilities came after a steady rise through Berkshire’s ranks. A native of Edmonton, Alberta, and an accountant by training, he joined the conglomerate in 2000 when Mr. Buffett bought a controlling stake in what was MidAmerican Energy, where he was president.
Mr. Abel was named vice chairman of Berkshire in 2018, anointing him as a potential successor to Mr. Buffett, a status that Mr. Buffett confirmed in 2021. “The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Mr. Buffett told CNBC at the time.
Aside from his work experience, Mr. Abel is known for his love of hockey, which he played as a child: He is a volunteer coach for his son’s team in Des Moines, where he lives and where Berkshire Hathaway Energy is based.
Why did he get the nod?
The relatively low-profile Mr. Abel has won praise from Mr. Buffett and others in the Berkshire orbit over the years for two key qualities.
The first is his operating expertise. He helped lead a string of acquisitions that turned MidAmerican — renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014 — into a major power producer. Since his elevation in 2018, he has overseen a much broader collection of businesses that together reported more than $5 billion in operating earnings in the first three months of this year.
Mr. Buffett has praised his heir apparent as an effective executive whom he trusted to make big decisions. By 2023, Mr. Buffett told CNBC, Mr. Abel “does all the work and I take all the bows.” The billionaire added, “He’s a big improvement on me, but don’t tell anybody.”
Mr. Abel’s other quality is that he is seen as fitting the Berkshire mold. He became a more serious contender to take over the conglomerate in 2011, when David Sokol, his former boss at MidAmerican who had been known as Mr. Buffett’s chief fixer, resigned. Berkshire had concluded Mr. Sokol violated company policies by buying about $10 million in shares of Lubrizol, a maker of specialty chemicals, while orchestrating an acquisition of the company.
The lower-key Mr. Abel, however, has been seen as cut from similar cloth as Mr. Buffett. “Greg will keep the culture,” Charles T. Munger, then Berkshire’s vice chairman and Mr. Buffett’s longtime business partner, told shareholders at the company’s 2021 annual meeting. The comment immediately set off succession speculation, which Mr. Buffett confirmed days later.
Mr. Abel has assumed more public duties in recent years, including sitting onstage for hours with Mr. Buffett at Berkshire’s annual meetings to answer investors’ questions.
How is Mr. Abel expected to run Berkshire?
Though Mr. Buffett won renown as one of the most successful stock pickers of all time, his successor’s strengths lie more in running businesses. That is in part a reflection of what Berkshire is today: an empire of often-disconnected businesses that together employ more than 392,000 workers.
Mr. Abel is not expected to choose the companies that go into Berkshire’s investment portfolio — the company already has two executives, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who were hired by Mr. Buffett to help with that. But he will oversee the kinds of big deals that the conglomerate is perhaps uniquely able to strike, given the $347.7 billion in cash that it is sitting on. (Mr. Buffett has called that his “elephant gun.”)
That will present a big challenge, however. For years, Mr. Buffett has not struck those kinds of acquisitions. And he has acknowledged that Berkshire is so large that it is hard to find a takeover target big enough to meaningfully augment its earnings.