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.
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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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