Who is Greg Abel, heir to Warren Buffett’s $1.4 trillion investment empire?

NEW YORK – Investors had speculated in recent years that Mr Warren Buffett might eventually retire. But the 94-year-old billionaire investment guru still surprised many on May 3 when he announced that he planned to

step down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway

after nearly six decades.

Less surprising is who he said he intended to succeed him as the leader of the US$1.1 trillion (S$1.4 trillion) conglomerate he built: Mr Greg Abel, his years-long heir apparent.

Who is Greg Abel?

Born in 1962 in Alberta, Canada, Mr Abel came from modest beginnings. Following his 1984 graduation from the University of Alberta, he worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers and CalEnergy. He joined MidAmerican Energy (now Berkshire Hathaway Energy) in 1992, which Berkshire acquired in 1999. 

Mr Abel’s vast responsibilities came after a steady rise through Berkshire’s ranks.

Since 2018, Mr Abel, 62, has been vice-chair of Berkshire’s non-insurance companies, the 189 operating businesses that include the BNSF railroad, one of the nation’s largest; Berkshire Hathaway Energy, a giant power utility; and restaurant chains and retailers, including Dairy Queen and the Borsheims jewellery chain.

Aside from his work experience, Mr Abel is known for his love of hockey, which he played as a child: He is a volunteer coach for his son’s team in Des Moines, Iowa, where he lives and where Berkshire Hathaway Energy is based.

Why was he picked?

The relatively low-profile Mr Abel has won praise from Mr Buffett and others in the Berkshire orbit over the years for two key qualities.

The first is his operating expertise. He helped lead a string of acquisitions that turned MidAmerican – renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014 – into a major power producer.

Since his elevation in 2018, he has overseen a much broader collection of businesses that together reported more than US$5 billion in operating earnings in the first three months of 2025.

Mr Buffett has praised his heir apparent as an effective executive whom he trusted to make big decisions. By 2023, he told CNBC, Mr Abel “does all the work and I take all the bows”.

The billionaire added: “He’s a big improvement on me, but don’t tell anybody.”

Mr Abel’s other quality is that he is seen as fitting the Berkshire mould. He became a more serious contender to take over the conglomerate in 2011, when Mr David Sokol, his former boss at MidAmerican who had been known as Mr Buffett’s chief fixer, resigned.

Berkshire had concluded Mr Sokol violated company policies by buying about US$10 million in shares of Lubrizol, a maker of speciality chemicals, while orchestrating an acquisition of the company.

The lower-key Mr Abel, however, has been seen as cut from similar cloth as Mr Buffett. “Greg will keep the culture,” Mr Charles T. Munger, then Berkshire’s vice-chair and Mr Buffett’s long-time business partner, told shareholders at the company’s 2021 annual meeting.

How is he expected to run Berkshire?

Though Mr Buffett won renown as one of the most successful stock pickers of all time, his successor’s strengths lie more in running businesses. That is in part a reflection of what Berkshire is today: an empire of often-disconnected businesses that together employ more than 392,000 workers.

Mr Abel is not expected to choose the companies that go into Berkshire’s investment portfolio – the company already has two executives, Mr Todd Combs and Mr Ted Weschler, who were hired by Mr Buffett to help with that.

But he will oversee the kinds of big deals that the conglomerate is perhaps uniquely able to strike, given the US$347.7 billion in cash that it is sitting on. (Mr Buffett has called that his “elephant gun”.)

That will present a big challenge, however. For years, Mr Buffett has not struck those kinds of acquisitions.

He has acknowledged that Berkshire is so large that it is hard to find a takeover target big enough to meaningfully augment its earnings. NYTIMES