Having announced his retirement in 2025, billionaire investor and businessman Warren Buffett, 95, formally stepped down from his position earlier this week, with his company Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman, Greg Abel, succeeding him.
Buffett’s name has become synonymous with the company itself. In the 1960s, alongside fellow investor Charles Munger, he helped transform Berkshire Hathaway from a textile enterprise to what The Economist has called “among the greatest successes in the history of business.” In 2024, the American conglomerate and holding company became the first non-tech company to attain $1 trillion in market capitalisation.
His imprint on Berkshire Hathaway, especially a legendary knack for making the right investments at the right time, could make for an unfair comparison. Here is what to know about Abel and the company he will lead.
Who is Greg Abel?
Gregory Edward Abel was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, on June 1, 1962, to a working-class family. Working odd jobs, he cleaned discarded bottles and filled fire extinguishers, according to the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a non-profit that honoured Abel in 2018.
Upon graduating from the University of Alberta, he worked at the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the energy firm CalEnergy. He joined MidAmerican Energy in 1992, which Berkshire later took over.
As Chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Abel oversaw several chemical, industrial and retail operations, among other things. Of late, he had taken over some of Buffett’s capital allocation responsibilities.
Many executives who work with Abel have called him a perceptive questioner who closely scrutinises financial metrics and wants to closely understand businesses and how they’re run. His name had been floated for a while now, as speculation around Buffett’s successor grew. A decade ago, then Vice Chairman Munger said, “His successors would not be ‘of only moderate ability’. For instance, Ajit Jain and Greg Abel are proven performers who would probably be under-described as ‘world-class’”. Munger died in 2023. Jain, 73, is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur.
What will Berkshire Hathaway investors be looking out for?
Abel has big shoes to fill. For decades, Buffett built a formidable reputation as an investor with an eye for companies that he perceived as being undervalued. Buffett once said of Munger, “The blueprint he gave me was simple: forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.”
He was mentored by Benjamin Graham, who is regarded as the father of value investing. Buffett would become the fiercest advocate of this principle, which involves selecting stocks that may be underestimated by the stock market and seem to be trading at less than their intrinsic value.
Buffett sought out companies that seemed to be underdogs in the field, experiencing a spot of trouble even as their business fundamentals remained sound. Berkshire thus came to acquire a diverse array of companies, such as GEICO, Coca-Cola, Duracell and the World Book Encyclopaedia. In 2016, the company began purchasing Apple shares that are now worth tens of billions.
However, little is known about Abel’s vision, given his limited press interactions. In a message to investors, he earlier said that the existing investment philosophy “will not change and it’s the approach we’ll take as we go forward.” A recent profile in the Financial Times also noted that until now, Berkshire Hathaway had stayed away from investing too much in technology companies, stating that they were too volatile and the business was dependent on constant innovations.
It said, “In 2011, he made an exception for IBM, placing a $10.9bn bet on the IT group, which proved to be a failure. Berkshire had sold the stock within seven years, with the IT group’s share price lower and seemingly trapped in a cycle of declining revenues.” On the other hand, the Apple bet has paid off.
Whether this strategy changes under Abel will be of interest. The report also highlighted the issue of how the company’s “record $168bn cash pile” will be allocated, describing it as “a sum so vast that the sprawling investment conglomerate could buy up all but a handful of companies.”
Greg Abel (right) and Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2018. (AP) 
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