Greg Abel “understands companies extremely well”

The announcement of the retirement of Warren Buffett may have surprised certain participants in the annual meeting of shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday, but the identity of the successor of the 94-year-old investment icon was not surprising.

In 2021, Buffett confirmed that Greg Abel – currently 62, and the vice -president of non -assurance operations of Berkshire – would finally take the CEO of the investment activity of 1.1 billion of dollars retired from Buffett. The billionaire investor reaffirmed this choice at the annual meeting of 2024, declaring that Belt would fully have the power to make Berkshire's investment decisions once he became CEO.

“I would leave the capital allowance in Greg and he understands extremely well the companies,” said Buffett to the shareholders at the meeting in May 2024. “If you understand companies, you will understand ordinary actions.”

Buffett, who plans to retire as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, promised on Saturday that he will not sell a single share of his own assets in Berkshire – worth more than $ 160 billion – during the company leadership transition to Abel.

“The decision to keep each share is an economic decision, because I think that Berkshire's prospects will be better under the direction of Greg than mine,” said Buffett.

Abel told shareholders on Saturday that he “maintained the reputation of Berkshire” as the next CEO. “It is really the investment philosophy and how Warren and the team have allocated capital in the past 60 years,” said Abel. “Really, it will not change. And this is the approach that we will adopt as you go.”

The Berkshire board of directors voted unanimously on Sunday to make the president and chief executive officer of Abel on January 1, 2026, with Buffett to stay as president of the company. Here are several elements to know about the person who is ready to replace Omaha's Oracle:

• Abel has been with Berkshire Hathaway for more than two decades, more recently supervising the company's energy as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy alongside his vice-president.

• Abel was born in Edmonton, Canada, where he grew up in a working class district with a seller father, he said. His uncle Sid Played professional hockey for more than a dozen seasons with the Detroit Red Wings. “I remember that I gathered with other children in the neighborhood as soon as we could after school”, ” Abel said to the Horatio Algiers association In May 2018. “We played hockey almost every day in summer and winter and remained away until we are called for dinner.”

• Growing up, Abel has earned money thanks to jobs, such as delivering advertising leaflets and filling fire extinguishers for the company where his father worked, Levitt Safety, according to The globe and the mail.

• He graduated from the University of Alberta in 1984 with a Baccalaureate in Accounting Trade, and worked as an accountant after the college – first for PricewaterhouseCoopers, then with the Geothermal Calenergy Electricity Company, which later became Midamerican Energy. “The accounts took over when I realized how extremely important it was to understand things such as income and cash flows,” he told the publication of the University of Alberta New path in 2013.

• In the mid-1990s, Abel moved to the United Kingdom to manage the CalenerGy takeover of a British public service. There he would have been impressed Walter Scott Jr., who was a shareholder of Calenergy and member of the Berkshire board of directors. “Greg is the kind of person that, whenever he is asked to do something, he is ready to go to do it,” Scott, who died in 2021, said about Abel In an interview of 2011 with Fortune.
• Abel joined Berkshire Hathaway when the company acquired majority interest in Midamerican in 1999, when Abel was the president of the energy company. He became CEO of Midamerican in 2008. The company then changed his name to Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

• His salary in Berkshire Hathaway varies from year to year. Abel had a Base salary of $ 21 million In 2024, and received significant bonuses in recent years, including $ 3 million in 2022, according to the DECS deposits. In 2016, he received 41 million dollars in compensation due to an incentive bonus linked to the profits of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, leapful This year.
• In 2022, Abel sold his 1% participation in BHE for $ 870 million. Buffett wanted his successor to be “someone who is … already very rich – what they should have been if they have worked for a long time – and who are really not motivated by the fact that they have 10 times more money than them and their families need it or 100 times more,” he said at the Berkshire annual meeting in 2017.

• Abel was labeled “a clever job” The Wall Street Journal. “I always take time for Greg when he calls, because he brings me great ideas and is really innovative in his thought and his commercial approach”, ” Buffett said in 2013.

• Decades after his career, Abel said he was always passionate: “I want to have an impact. I want to roll up my sleeves and be actively committed to the success of our business,” he said The Horatio Algiers association In 2018. “I think hard work is leading to good results,” he said. “In my schooling, in sports and in my commercial posts, I learned that if I put a lot of work and was well prepared, success would be more likely.”

Abel had long been considered a possible Buffett successor, with the vice-president of Berkshire insurance operations, Ajit Jain. Buffett praised the two leaders on their promotions in vice-president positions in 2018.

“They both have Berkshire in their blood. They love the business. They know their operations like the back of their hand,” Buffett told CNBC at the time.

Buffett's long -standing trading partner, Charlie Munger, who died in 2023, also praised Abel and Jain, calling them “proven artists” while adding shareholder letter This “in an important way, everyone is a better business manager than Buffett”.

In 2023, Munger distinguished Abel, singing his praise as a framework in a Interview with CNBC: “Greg is simply sensational to be a business manager, both as a thinker and as a practitioner.”

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