Greg Abel: Warren Buffett’s heir takes the throne

These are great times for former Canadian ice-hockey players. One has just been elected prime minister of his country, another will shortly take the helm of one of America’s most venerated financial institutions – Warren Buffett’s $1.16 trillion powerhouse, Berkshire Hathaway. Both are considered safe pairs of hands.

Greg Abel’s elevation wasn’t a surprise, says Bloomberg. He’s been teed-up to replace the 94-year-old “philosopher king of modern investing” since 2021. But the timing of Buffett’s announcement, at the end of Berkshire’s annual meeting on 3 May, took even his pink-cheeked successor unawares.

The first thing to note, says The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), is that Abel, 62, is no mini-Warren – at least in terms of stockpicking. He’s more of a strategic business builder and manager. A trained accountant from the Canadian prairies, he joined Berkshire 25 years ago when the sprawling conglomerate took control of Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy, where he was an executive. The aptly-named Abel built the renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy into one of the group’s biggest businesses through a series of acquisitions and investments.

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He caught the eye of the Sage of Omaha early on. By 2018, “Buffett had seen enough” to put him “in charge of all Berkshire’s businesses outside of its insurance operations and add him to the board”. Both he and his late friend and investment partner, Charlie Munger, have since been unsparing in their praise. In 2023, the latter described him as “just sensational at being a business leader, both as thinker and a doer… a very remarkable human being” – observing that Abel is cut from the same psychological cloth as Buffett; patient, unshowy, value-driven, yet unafraid to make big bets.

Who is Greg Abel?

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1962, Abel grew up in a working-class neighbourhood and, in common with many of his peers, he loved ice hockey, says CNN Business. He worked a variety of jobs as a child, including as a forestry labourer, and at college, filled fire extinguishers for a company called Levitt Safety, which gave him a small scholarship to the University of Alberta. After graduating in 1984 with a degree in accounting, Abel’s professional career began with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Edmonton. It was relocation to the firm’s San Francisco office that kick-started the American odyssey that led him to Buffett.

A long-time resident of Des Moines, Iowa, Abel – whose net worth was put at about $484 million in 2021 – is often described as “a regular guy who’s stayed close to his roots”, says Republic Business (India). “He’s sometimes spotted at local hockey rinks watching his son play.” He once told an interviewer that the game had taught him that “you are more successful if you play as a team than as an individual”. But behind that low-key image is “a serious operator”. In a 2019 profile, friends described him as “a fiercely intelligent, hyper-efficient guy whose work is his life and who hides his talents behind a wall of humility”.

“In the high-pressure realm of ‘hard acts to follow’, Greg Abel, is now centre stage,” says The Globe and Mail (Canada). Dispiritingly, Berkshire’s shares fell 5% on the announcement. No one expects Abel to achieve the stellar results Buffett has over the past six decades, “simply because the latter’s performance has been so off-the-charts brilliant”. But there’s no reason to think he won’t “at least continue to beat the broader market” with the help of investment lieutenants Todd Combs and Ted Weschler. It would be a huge mistake to try to “be” Buffett, “and he knows that”, one Fidelity investor told the WSJ. “Shareholders want Greg to be the best Greg Abel he can be.” It’s much harder to move the needle on Berkshire’s trillion-dollar assets than it once was, but Buffett has left his successor $348 billion of dry powder. Let’s see what he does with it.

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