Omaha, Neb. – When Warren Buffett Announced at its annual shareholders meeting on Saturday that will resign as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year, raised a 62 -year -old Canadian executive named Greg Abel, who for a long time has been one of its main lieutenants.
During the last seven years, Abel has supervised the BNSF Railroad of Berkshire and its Treut Makers See See manufacturers.
He grew up in Canada as a hockey player and learned the value of hard work while racing discarded bottles and worked for a small company that filled fire extinguishers. It is now at the top of the food chain in the world of investment.
Berkshire confirmed Abel as Buffett’s successor in 2021 after the former Vice President Charlie Muger Let it pass at the annual meeting. Since then, Abel has remained largely in Buffett’s shadow, although shareholders have had the opportunity to meet him a bit when he appeared with Buffett in the Annual meetings and in Interviews.
The Berkshire Board will now vote on whether it will formally approve Abel as the new CEO to take charge at the end of 2025. At the annual meeting in Omaha, Buffet said he hopes that will happen by a unanimous vote.
Abel will account to take responsibility for the entire eclectic assortment of Berkshire companies with its almost 400,000 employees and the massive shares portfolio of the conglomerate. Buffett and the members of the Berkshire Board who for years have dedicated much of their time to find Buffett’s successor praised Abel’s brilliance and ability to understand all kinds of businesses.
Buffet once said that Berkshire is “very fortunate” to have Abel ready to take care, but will have problems approaching Buffett’s remarkable history of overcoming the market. While Buffett grew Berkshire throughout the decades by making agreements and investments of well -operated shares at attractive prices, Berkshire’s massive size has made it much harder to find something large enough to change the final result of the conglomerate.
Abel has large shoes to fill, but no one expects to coincide with Buffett’s achievements that made him a billionaire many times and one of the richest investors of the last century. The Berkshire Board member, Ron Olson, said two days before the announcement that he He believed that Abel was ready To take charge.
“Is it another Warren Buffett? No, there is no other Warren Buffet that he knows. But he has many of Warren’s foundations,” said Olson. “He is safe of high integrity. He is a great worker. He is a strategic thinker.”
Buffet has said for years that Abel’s main work when CEO will be to preserve the unique decentralized culture of Berkshire based on independence, integrity and trust. In fact, Muger’s comment that gave Abel’s future role was that “Greg will maintain culture.”
Executives of a diverse mixture of Berkshire subsidiaries, including the Brooks Running Shoes manufacturer, the Shaw and Borsheims Jewelry floors giant have said that everyone resorts to Abel every time they face difficult questions in their businesses related to the strategy or operational details, and he is always available when he needs it even if he challenges them.
“When I think of Greg, he not only has a great commercial insight, but he has really high commercial instincts,” said Dairy Queen CEO, Troy Bader. “Intuition is really important. And, you know, Warren has that intuition, but Greg also has a lot.”
Abel has never conducted many interviews, although he exhibited his detailed commercial knowledge in Berkshire meetings when talking about public services and the railroad. But he did offer a look at His background To the Horathio Alger association when that group honored him in 2018.
Abel’s family -oriented education in Edmonton, Alberta, and hard -working lessons and perseverance were similar to what Buffet learned while working at his grandfather’s Omaha grocery store when he was a child.
“I think that hard work leads to good results. In my education, in sports and in my commercial positions, I learned that if I worked hard and was well prepared, then success would be more likely,” Abel said in 2018.
Abel lives approximately two hours from the hometown of Buffett in Des Moines, Iowa, where he has led Berkshire Hathaway Energy since 2011 and helped train the hockey and football teams of their children. It is expected to continue living there because Berkshire is so decentralized that there are few reasons to move to its Omaha headquarters. Buffett only had a couple of dozen people working in his office while spending his days reading commercial reports and making an occasional phone call.
