OMAHA, Neb. – When Warren Buffett announced at his annual shareholder meeting Saturday that he is stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year, he elevated a low-key 62-year-old Canadian executive named Greg Abel who has long been one of his top lieutenants.
For the past seven years, Abel has been overseeing Berkshire’s BNSF railroad and its treat makers See’s Candies and Dairy Queen along with dozens of other manufacturing and retail businesses that Buffett acquired over the years.
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He grew up in Canada as a hockey player and learned the value of hard work as he redeemed discarded bottles and worked for a small company filling fire extinguishers. Now he finds himself at the top of the food chain in the investment world.
Berkshire confirmed Abel as Buffett’s successor in 2021 after former Vice Chairman Charlie Munger let it slip at the annual meeting. Since then, Abel has largely remained in Buffett’s shadow although shareholders have had a chance to get to know him a bit when he appeared alongside Buffett at the annual meetings and in interviews.
Berkshire's board will now vote on whether to formally approve Abel as the new CEO to take over at the end of 2025. At the annual meeting in Omaha, Buffett said he expects that to occur by a unanimous vote.
Abel will step forward to take responsibility for all of Berkshire’s eclectic assortment of businesses with their nearly 400,000 employees and the conglomerate’s massive stock portfolio. Buffett and members of Berkshire’s board who for years have devoted much of their time to finding Buffett’s successor have praised Abel’s brilliance and knack for understanding all kinds of businesses.
Buffett once said Berkshire is “so damn lucky” to have Abel ready to take over, but he will have trouble coming close to Buffett’s remarkable track record of outpacing the market. Whereas Buffett grew Berkshire over the decades by making well-timed deals and stock investments at attractive prices, Berkshire’s massive size has made it that much harder lately to find anything big enough to change the conglomerate’s bottom line.
Abel has big shoes to fill, but no one expects him to match the accomplishments of Buffett that made him a billionaire many times over and one of the wealthiest investors of the past century. Longtime Berkshire board member Ron Olson said two days before the announcement that he believed Abel was ready to take over.
“Is he another Warren Buffett? No, there is no other Warren Buffett that I know. But he has so many of the fundamentals of Warren,” Olson said. “He is for sure high integrity. He is a hard worker. He is a strategic thinker."
Buffett has said for years that Abel’s main job when he becomes CEO will be to preserve Berkshire’s unique decentralized culture built on independence, integrity and trust. In fact, Munger’s comment that gave away Abel’s future role was that “Greg will keep the culture.”
Executives at a diverse mix of Berkshire subsidiaries, including sneaker maker Brooks Running, flooring giant Shaw and Borsheims jewelry have said they all turn to Abel whenever they face tough questions in their businesses related to strategy or operating details, and he’s always available when they need him though he will challenge them.
“When I think about Greg, he not only has high business acumen, but he has really high business instincts,” Dairy Queen CEO Troy Bader said Friday. “The intuition is really important. And, you know, Warren has that intuition, but Greg has a lot of it as well."
Abel has never done many interviews, though he put his detailed business knowledge on display at the Berkshire meetings when discussing utilities and the railroad. But he did offer a glimpse into his background to the Horatio Alger Association when that group honored him in 2018.
Abel's family-oriented upbringing in Edmonton, Alberta, and lessons in hard work and perseverance were similar to what Buffett learned while working in his grandfather’s Omaha grocery store as a kid.
“I think hard work leads to good outcomes. In my schooling, in sports, and in my business positions, I learned that if I put in a lot of work and was well-prepared, then success would be more likely,” Abel said in 2018.
Abel lives about two hours from Buffett’s hometown in Des Moines, Iowa, where he has led Berkshire Hathaway Energy since 2011 and helped coach his kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He is expected to continue living there because Berkshire is so decentralized that there is little reason to move to its Omaha headquarters. Buffett only had a couple dozen people working in his office as he spent his days reading business reports and making the occasional phone call.