Gregory Abel

His boss, Warren Buffett, is a hard act to follow, but Buffett believes Gregory Abel has the right stuff. “The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett said to CNBC back in 2021. As then–vice chairman Charlie Munger put it at the time, Berkshire only works if the culture persists, and “Greg will keep the culture.” He’s known as a rare combination of visionary, dealmaker, and top operator. The soft-spoken Abel was born in Canada and started out in accounting before joining a small geothermal company in California. That company, MidAmerican, was acquired by Berkshire in 2000; Abel went on to run the business, which was later renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Over the years he expanded his purview to overseeing all of Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses in 2018, and was anointed Buffett’s eventual successor as CEO in 2021.