Warren Buffett's successor is a deal-making business whiz who never misses his son's hockey games

As Susie and Howard Buffett drove back to Omaha from Des Moines recently, they felt an immediate compulsion to call their father — legendary investor Warren Buffett.

Buffett’s children had just finished lunch with Greg Abel, the man Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway’s board have tabbed to be be the company’s next CEO.

Greg’s perfect for the job, they told their father of the man that they found — in Susie’s words — to be brilliant, kind, funny, outgoing, unpretentious and completely trustworthy.

In all those ways, Susie says, a lot like her father.

“It was amazing to me, because for years, I thought, ‘What is going to happen when my dad is gone? No one can take his place.’ And no one can take his place, of course. He’s Warren,” Susie Buffett said. “But Greg is the person.”

When Berkshire’s shareholders gather in Omaha this week for their annual meeting, Abel will be there in his relatively new but increasingly familiar place: On the stage, right at Buffett’s elbow.

That spot for decades was occupied by Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. But even before Munger’s death in 2023, the 94-year-old Buffett had been elevating Abel’s public role at the meetings, preparing for the inevitable day when Buffett, too, leaves the stage.

It has been four years since Munger, in a slip of the tongue during the 2021 meeting, revealed that Abel would be Buffett’s successor. Still, even to the most devout Berkshire shareholders, Abel remains in many ways an enigma.

Abel — again much like Buffett — largely shuns the spotlight outside of the annual meetings. He has granted few interviews (and he declined to comment for this story).

But speaking to those who know Abel paints a picture of a devoted and energetic family man with a keen mind for business.

He can read a financial spreadsheet like a road map, able to chart a new course for a struggling business line or recognize a future investment opportunity.

He has been tougher than Buffett when it comes to oversight of Berkshire’s subsidiary companies — but performs that job with a fair and supportive touch.

He’s also a hockey-loving native of Canada who takes time to coach his youngest son’s team in West Des Moines. Dressed like an elementary school P.E. teacher in gym pants and a sweatshirt, he’s on the ice offering instruction, encouragement and fist-bumps to the kids.

“He’s just another guy out there,” said Shayne Ratcliff, who manages an ice rink and has coached with Abel. “He’s a great coach, he’s a great father, he’s a great friend. He’s a super nice guy, and he wants the kids to have nothing but fun.”

Even if you don’t know Abel, his handiwork can be seen along that interstate drive between Omaha and Des Moines that Buffett’s kids recently took. Abel is the reason for the procession of wind turbines along the horizon, a project that showed off the Berkshire Energy executive’s knack for business deals.

“He is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” said David Sokol, a former Berkshire executive and friend of Abel. “He absorbs information in an incredible fashion.”

Warren Buffett has increasingly given assurances that the 62-year-old Abel is more than able to fill the CEO role.

“I couldn’t feel better about Greg,” he said in a statement to The World-Herald last week.

Buffett’s most recent letter to shareholders in February praised Abel’s proven and “vivid” ability to strike when financial opportunity knocks — and noted it was “only a matter of time” before Abel would be writing the letters.

“Warren is very knowledgeable of the actuarial tables,” said Lawrence Cunningham, a University of Delaware professor who writes about Buffett and Berkshire. “Each year, the probability he will be there next year decreases by a lot.”

Others at Berkshire share Buffett’s view that when that day comes, Abel will be ready.

Over the years, Buffett has stressed the importance of succession planning with CEOs of Berkshire subsidiaries. Should key jobs suddenly open, they need to know exactly who is next in line.

That’s a test Buffett aced, said Adam Johnson, CEO of Berkshire’s NetJets.

“No one has done a better job at that than Warren himself in naming Greg as his successor,” Johnson said.

Hockey helped shape leadership style

In 1992, Sokol was CEO of an Omaha-based energy company looking to hire a manager at a power plant in California. That’s when he received an unusual and unexpected application from an accountant.

At the time, Abel was working for PricewaterhouseCoopers in San Francisco but wanted to move into business management.

Sokol soon recognized he wasn’t talking to an ordinary bean counter. Abel had a varied skillset, instinct for understanding business operations and insight into how to “make things better.”

“Within a very short period of time, he and I were partners,” Sokol said. “I never felt he worked for me. We worked together.”

That marked the beginning of Abel’s climb through the nation’s energy industry — an ascent that eventually captured the eye of Buffett.

Abel grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Edmonton, Alberta, a boom and bust Canadian oil town where Abel said “people had jobs, and sometimes they didn’t.”  

The son of a salesman and stay-at-home mom, he was raised to value family, education, hard work and the importance of goals and dreams.

“They emphasized to me that if I was going to do something, I needed to give it my best effort,” he was quoted in a biography for the Horatio Alger Association.

He got into business at a young age, delivering advertising flyers on his bike for a quarter of a cent each, collecting discarded pop bottles for the nickel deposit, then filling fire extinguishers in high school.

And like many Canadian kids, he grew up in hockey skates. In fact, his uncle, Sid Abel, was a Canadian hockey legend who won three Stanley Cups.

Abel and his friends played ice hockey in winter and street hockey the rest of the year, shooting pucks until called home for dinner.

More than just sport, Abel said hockey provided the foundation for his leadership style. To help his team get better, he felt obligated to work hard and set an example.

“When you play hockey, you quickly learn that you are more successful if you play as a team than as an individual,” he said.

He went to the University of Alberta to study accounting and joined PricewaterhouseCoopers in Edmonton before moving to its San Francisco office. One of his clients was California Energy, Sokol’s firm, which he soon joined as an executive.

With Kiewit construction’s Walter Scott as chairman, Sokol as CEO and Abel as the financial architect, the company built dozens of energy plants and made a series of acquisitions that helped it grow into today’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy. What started as roughly a $100 million company with 500 employees now has 24,000 employees, annual revenues of $26 billion and earnings of $3.7 billion.

Sokol said Abel possessed such an amazing ability to understand a business just by looking at its balance sheet, their firm often understood the fundamentals of the businesses they were acquiring better than those operating them.

Abel later said he couldn’t have had better business mentors than Sokol and Scott, calling the opportunity to work with them “a defining moment in my life.”

Abel moved his family to England for two years after the firm acquired an electrical utility there. Before that from 1992 to 1996, he lived in Omaha, where California Energy had its headquarters. His home was in Dundee — coincidentally, five blocks down Farnam Street from his future boss, Buffett.

‘A dealmaker’

After California Energy bought Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy in 1999 and took on its name, the firm caught Buffett’s notice.

Buffett bought a controlling interest for $9 billion later that year and added it to his conglomerate of companies. (In 2022, Abel sold a remaining personal stake in the company to Berkshire for $870 million.)

It wasn’t long after Berkshire’s MidAmerican acquisition that Buffett expressed his admiration for Abel. In 2002, he called the energy executive “a dealmaker.”

Abel became CEO of BH Energy in 2008 and added the title of chairman in 2011. And with Berkshire’s mighty balance sheet providing the capital, Abel kept the growth and acquisitions coming.

Sokol says the wind turbines across Iowa came as a result of Abel listening to ratepayers and government officials. The result: Iowa became one of the nation’s renewable energy leaders, while rates for Iowa consumers stayed flat through the retirement of inefficient, older coal plants.

Over time, Buffett realized Abel’s skills went well beyond the energy sector.

“I always make time for Greg when he calls, because he brings me great ideas and is truly innovative in his thinking and business approach,” Buffett told the University of Alberta’s alumni magazine in 2013. He added later that Abel was “a smart guy who would never do a dumb thing.”

In 2018, that trust led to an expansive new role for Abel at Berkshire.

Slowing down at 87, Buffett was looking to clear some responsibilities off his plate. So he appointed Abel and Ajit Jain as Berkshire vice chairmen, with Jain overseeing insurance-related subsidiaries and Abel taking oversight of the rest.

Abel became chief overseer for some five dozen companies as varied as Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom and BNSF Railway. He appoints their CEOs, reviews financial reports every month and offers input on tricky problems or improving operations.

Berkshire CEOs working under Abel describe him as firm but fair. And if there are warts on the balance sheet, Abel will find them.

“I don’t remember a month or a quarter gone by where Greg didn’t have a question or clarity or a thought,” said NetJets’ Johnson. “And I have to remind myself that he’s doing that 60 times.”

Adam Wright, an Omaha North High grad and former UNO football star who is CEO of travel center operator Pilot Flying J, said as a boss Abel is “extremely consistent, very reasonable and always coaching.”

‘The approach is the same’

Buffett has expressed delight with the arrangement, which freed him up for the part of the job he likes most: investing the trillion-dollar company’s free capital.

That’s also a task Buffett and others think Abel will handle well when he’s in charge, citing his proven ability to size up and take advantage of opportunities.

Pat Egan, CEO of See’s Candies who previously worked with Abel in the energy sector, said he has watched up close as both Abel and Buffett have evaluated business acquisitions.

“The approach is the same,” he said. Do your homework. Ask the right questions. Dig so deeply into the balance sheets that you understand the business better than the person on the other side of the table.

In some ways, Cunningham said, Abel may be better positioned to run today’s Berkshire than Buffett.

Buffett has lamented that Berkshire has grown so large it’s hard to find an investment that can “move the needle.” That can make operational improvements of existing businesses all the more critical, Cunningham said, and that’s Abel’s “super power.”

“What he’s really good at is running stuff,” Cunningham said. “Warren never operated anything.”

Abel is paid handsomely for his work.

While Buffett has set his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years, Berkshire disclosures show Abel was paid $21 million in 2024.

Those disclosures also show Abel owns shares of Berkshire worth roughly $180 million. The vast majority of those shares are held in trust for the benefit of his wife and children, though Abel retains financial interest and still has voting power and the right to dispose of or direct the shares.

Susie Buffett said Abel and her father talk on the phone frequently, if not every day. They have a lot of fun.

And Susie isn’t the only one who sees a lot of her father in Abel.

“Greg himself would say no one can replace Warren at the end of the day,” Egan said. “That said, if there’s a guy with a broader sense of the economy and what the direction is from Warren and Charlie, I can’t think of a better person.”

Egan said one trait Buffett and Abel share is unflinching integrity. Berkshire has a reputation for keeping its word and never cutting corners, Egan said, the reason its leaders “get to sleep at night.” That won’t change under Abel, he said.

Other similarities include attention to detail, appetite for information, work ethic, Midwest sensibility and belief in a long-term corporate culture that ignores the daily noise of Wall Street.

Said Wright: “What the market says about (Berkshire) is great, what the pundits say about it is fine. What we say about it at Berkshire, and our view of it, is what’s always, I believe, going to guide the company.”

‘People like him’

For all of Abel’s business acumen, talk to businessmen who know him and they often bring up Abel the person first.

“Every time I talk with Greg, there are matters of great importance, and he pretty much never fails to ask about my family and my kids,” Egan said. “He’s a nice guy and he’s wicked smart. And he’s able to balance that as well as anybody I know.”

Wright was leading MidAmerican Energy in Des Moines when his wife faced a serious health issue. Without saying anything to Wright, Abel — out of his own pocket — arranged to have a driver take the couple on the regular 3½-hour round trip between Des Moines and Iowa City for her treatment.

“Everything you hear about him as a leader and business person is true and then some,” Wright said. “The things you don’t know about him as a man are even more impressive and impactful.”

Friends say family is very important to Abel.

Despite a busy schedule that finds him jetting all over the world, Ratcliff said Abel the hockey coach never missed one of his son’s games last winter — including seven out-of-town tournaments — and only missed a couple of practices.

Abel is just like any other hockey parent around the rink, Ratcliff said. Other than the fact Abel’s name is on one of the rinks — he and MidAmerican were major donors for the city-run facility — you would never know he’s a wealthy corporate executive.

West Des Moines is where Abel makes his home, he and his family keeping a relatively low profile. But you will see them around town at concerts, sporting events, a pizza joint or during annual outings to the Iowa State Fair.

“He has tremendous talent, but he does not come across as having a huge ego,” said friend Mark Oman, a retired Wells Fargo executive. “People like him, and they should. He’s a good guy.”

Some of Abel’s Des Moines friends have said he is likely to keep his home there even after he takes over as Berkshire CEO, noting the flight to Omaha takes all of 15 minutes.

Others suggested Abel is likely to move to Omaha once his youngest son, who is about 13, finishes school.

Regardless of where he lives, Berkshire’s headquarters and its small cadre of staffers aren’t going anywhere. Susie Buffett said Abel said as much during a lunch with Berkshire employees two months ago.

Susie, who along with brother Howard serves on Berkshire’s board, said she has been trying to get to know Abel better. Hence, that recent lunch in Des Moines.

She said when the day does come, it will take everyone time to get used to her father not being there.

“But I think the company will continue to get stronger and better with Greg,” she said. “I really believe that.”