Så präglar Abel Berkshire 100 dagar efter tronskiftet

Abel is scrutinizing businesses and investments established under Warren Buffett’s long run

On a cold afternoon in December, as Greg Abel was days away from taking the reins of Berkshire Hathaway, he took questions from employees at a weekly staff luncheon.

One asked if he was going to move the company out of Omaha, Neb., its headquarters for decades during Warren Buffett’s run as leader. No, Abel said, there would be no move.

The idea would have seemed absurd at nearly any point during Buffett’s tenure. But what many of the employees were surely thinking was that change is coming.

Abel has elevated deputies who worked closely with him as head of the conglomerate side of Berkshire; taken a bigger annual salary than Buffett while pledging to spend most of it buying company shares; and revived a stock-buyback program that had idled since 2024. He has stepped up Berkshire’s interests in Japan, buying a stake in an insurer there.

Known for being more hands-on than Buffett, Abel is scrutinizing Berkshire’s businesses and stock portfolio with a fresh and more-critical eye than his predecessor, people familiar with the matter said. He is expected to have a strong hand with companies, stockholdings and even senior executives who don’t meet his expectations, the people said.

“Warren, Charlie and I, we have some differences, just in style and obviously in how we approach things,” Abel said in an interview, referring to Buffett and his longtime business partner, the late Charlie Munger. Abel added, “Our foundational values continue to be what we build our company through.”

Abel, 63, who succeeded Buffett as chief executive officer in January, has pledged to maintain what has made the company such an unusual fixture: its culture and values, a dominant insurance business and a conglomerate of unrelated businesses, and a stock portfolio managed by the CEO.

On several workdays each week, Abel climbs into a car waiting outside his home in Des Moines, Iowa, and makes the two-hour commute to Omaha. Abel has no immediate plans to move to Omaha, and will likely live in Iowa at least until his son graduates from high school in a few years, according to people familiar with the matter.

It isn’t uncommon for Abel to be in different states within the same day. A large part of Abel’s workweek is spent crisscrossing the country on a corporate plane managed by NetJets, a Berkshire unit, to visit with the managers of Berkshire’s businesses.

In his Feb. 28 annual letter to shareholders, his first, Abel made clear there are positions he considers “core,” such as Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola and Moody’s. People familiar with Berkshire’s investments said Abel has already unloaded the stocks managed by Todd Combs, who recently decamped for JPMorgan Chase. He was one of two investment managers Buffett had recruited. Abel is unlikely to hire anyone to help manage the portfolio, according to the people.

Berkshire employees and shareholders have known Abel would succeed Buffett since Munger let it slip during Berkshire’s 2021 annual meeting in Omaha. But the timing of the succession remained a mystery through Munger’s death in November 2023 and until this past May, when Buffett, 95, declared on the same stage that he intended to retire at year-end .

“That is really when the transition started,” Abel said.

At the December luncheon in Omaha, the staffers’ other questions carried lower stakes; one asked if the arrival of Abel, a hockey-loving Canadian, would mean better ice rinks in the city. By the time lunch ended, Abel’s food was cold and largely uneaten on the paper plate in front of him.

Abel has spent the past year giving priority to learning Berkshire’s insurance business and visiting with Ajit Jain, the brains behind the operation. Jain is expected to continue heading insurance at Berkshire, though the company has developed a succession plan for him, too. “He’s probably going to be at the company for as long as he can,” Buffett said in an interview.

Berkshire’s new CEO has also emphasized spending time with leaders at subsidiary companies, particularly with BNSF Railway, its railroad business, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, where he was chief executive for many years, according to people familiar with the matter.

“If I think about my first 100 days,” Abel said, “focus on operational excellence hasn’t declined.”

Buffett has made it clear to those in and outside Berkshire that Abel is now running the show. When businesspeople send letters to Buffett hoping to strike a deal, he will respond, but send a copy of his response and the original letter to Abel. While Abel presented his first shareholder letter to Buffett before its publication, Buffett kept a light touch with his edits, according to people familiar with the matter.

Abel, originally from the Canadian Prairies, in many ways embodies Buffett’s Midwestern charm and reputation as a folksy peacemaker. He rooted for the men’s Canadian hockey team and the women’s U.S. team during the Olympics, a diplomatic effort to avoid picking sides. He has remained a coach on his son’s hockey team. He gives every player a high-five when getting off the ice.

One difference between Buffett and Abel, according to those who know both men: Abel doesn’t shy away from confrontation. Buffett has said he left people in managerial roles even if they didn’t meet his standards, preferring to avoid the unpleasant aspects of management. Abel, on the other hand, is unafraid to do what it takes to improve the business, even if it means firing someone.

While he emphasized that Berkshire’s favorite holding period is “forever,” if a business doesn’t meet his expectations, a sale isn’t out of the question, according to the people. Berkshire has rarely sold its wholly owned subsidiaries, unloading its newspaper businesses in 2020 and closing its textile business in 1985.

Lawrence Cunningham, author of several books about Berkshire, said that he asked Abel in a conversation about a year ago whether he planned to follow the tendency of Buffett and Munger to overlook laggards among subsidiary companies.

“He’s like, ‘I’m not going to do that. I believe in autonomy. I believe in decentralization. But if there are laggards, I’m going to call them out,’” Cunningham said.

While Buffett would stay out of the business unless he felt companies weren’t performing to par, Abel’s style is to take pre-emptive action to make his expectations clear, people familiar with Berkshire’s businesses said.

“Greg likes to be engaged anyway, so he’s going to be more hands-on and more engaged in the details of the business,” said Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, in which Berkshire has a significant stake. “He’s a tough negotiator, but again, honest and fair.”

Abel said in his annual letter that Berkshire would continue its “concentrated approach” to stock investing, citing its largest holdings as examples, except for Bank of America and Chevron. The conglomerate doesn’t view these positions as core, according to people familiar with the matter.

For many shareholders, the true test of Abel’s mettle will be his ability to use Berkshire’s record $373.1 billion cash pile for big acquisitions.

“I won’t be able to evaluate how good he is until we get the next deep recession,” said Chris Bloomstran, chief investment officer at Semper Augustus Investments, a longtime Berkshire shareholder. “The shareholders’ charge to Greg should be you have got to have a willingness to go put $300 billion to work. The expectation is he’ll do it, and he’ll do it more aggressively than Warren did it in his later years.”