Greg Abel Earned Warren Buffett’s Trust. Now, He Has Buffett’s Job

For most of the world, Wednesday marked the end of 2025. For Berkshire Hathaway, it was the end of an era.

Warren Buffett, the Coca-Cola-chugging investing legend who built the once declining textile business into a $1 trillion juggernaut, stepped down as CEO, handing the top job to his handpicked successor, Greg Abel, 63, as of January 1. While Abel has earned the 95-year-old Oracle of Omaha’s trust, he has yet to acquire his star power and remains a virtual blank slate in the public imagination. So who is he?

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Abel was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he attended the University of Alberta. That’s enough to tell you that he’s a hockey guy. His uncle Sid, in fact, was a three-time Stanley Cup champion and Hall of Fame center for the Detroit Red Wings. In Des Moines, Iowa, where Abel now lives, he’s known as a volunteer youth hockey coach who makes time for “pizza and beer with friends” when he’s not working or trekking to tournaments with other hockey parents.

An accountant by training, Abel was working at Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy when Berkshire took over the company in 2000. He climbed to the top job eight years later, benefitting from Buffett’s preference that subsidiaries reinvest earnings rather than pay out dividends. That allowed Abel to pursue acquisitions, among them Nevada-based utility NV Energy and electricity transmission company AltaLink in his home province of Alberta. In 2014, MidAmerican’s holding company was renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and four years later, Abel assumed responsibility for all of Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses, expanding his fiefdom to include BNSF railroad, chemical and industrial companies and retail producers like Fruit of the Loom. Taking over the CEO job means:

• Abel will have ultimate responsibility for Berkshire’s insurance operations and the company’s mammoth $380 billion war chest, a cash pile Buffett has built up as a net seller of stocks for 12 straight quarters. He has limited experience in both areas.

• Abel can tap the expertise of Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s insurance mastermind, whom Buffett said didn’t want the top job but is sticking around. On the investment front, stockpicking guru Todd Combs recently decamped for JPMorgan, but Berkshire’s other top stockpicker, Ted Weschler, remains.

High Stakes: Buffett’s idiosyncratic principles, such as shunning stock splits and dividends, emphasizing “value” investing and relying on decentralized management, have been tolerated, embraced even, in part because of his roughly $145 billion stake in the company. Abel, meanwhile, has just $170 million worth of stock. To assure investors of his faith in his successor — “a great manager, a tireless worker and an honest communicator” — Buffett has said he plans to keep a “significant” stake in the company. If Abel wants anything like the latitude investors gave the “Oracle of Omaha,” he’ll need to demonstrate he has skin in the game. Berkshire shares fell 1.4% on Friday, so he could even buy the mini-dip.

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