Warren Buffett ran Berkshire Hathaway for 60 years. He turned a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate by doing one thing consistently: buying good businesses at fair prices and leaving them alone. At the 2025 annual meeting in Omaha, he told the crowd Greg Abel would take over before year end. Then he stepped back. Since January 2026, it's been Abel's company — and honestly, the market has barely reacted, which is either a vote of confidence or a sign that nobody quite knows what to make of it yet.
Who Abel Is
If you haven't followed Berkshire closely, you can be forgiven for drawing a blank. He's 63, Canadian, trained as an accountant. He joined what is now Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 1992 and became its chief executive in 2008 — he's been running energy businesses longer than most people reading this have been paying attention to markets. He joined the main board in 2018, got named vice chairman for non-insurance operations, and became the obvious heir. He doesn't do many interviews. There's no nickname. No leather jacket. People who've worked with him describe a guy who runs businesses, period — not someone who writes annual letters that get framed and quoted at conferences.
That difference matters more than it sounds. Part of Berkshire's edge — genuinely baked into the deal flow — was Buffett's name. CEOs would sometimes sell to him at below-market prices specifically because they trusted he wouldn't break up the company or fire the managers they'd spent decades building teams with. That kind of trust isn't transferable. Abel has to rebuild it from scratch, one deal at a time.
What He Walked Into
$334 billion in cash and short-term investments. That's what Berkshire had at the end of 2025. It's become something of a running joke — larger than the GDP of most countries, sitting in Treasuries earning 4-5% while Berkshire's actual operating businesses earn considerably more on capital. Buffett spent years saying he was hunting for elephant-sized acquisitions. Nothing cleared the bar. Abel now inherits the same problem with even more money and without the acquisition reputation that made Berkshire a uniquely attractive buyer to sellers who cared about legacy.
The equity portfolio is enormous and closely watched. A large Apple position — though Buffett trimmed it roughly in half before stepping down — plus American Express, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Chevron. Every quarterly 13-F filing will still get dissected like a Kremlinology exercise. That doesn't change just because Buffett isn't signing the forms anymore.
The Cash Isn't Just an Asset
It's also a problem. Cash earning 4-5% in Treasuries is respectable, but it's not what Berkshire's operating businesses return on capital. At $334 billion, the drag is real in absolute terms even if the percentage looks tidy. Every quarter without a major deployment is a quarter where the world's most famous value investor is, effectively, just running a bond fund with good subsidiaries attached.
Abel's most realistic path forward might actually be investing behind what Berkshire already owns. Berkshire Hathaway Energy has significant infrastructure investment needs in renewables and grid modernization. BNSF Railway could use capital. These are businesses Abel knows from the inside. Investing behind companies you already understand is about as Buffett-esque an approach as you can take — and it plays directly to Abel's operational background in a way that competing for flashy acquisitions wouldn't.
The Letter, and What It Tells You
Abel wrote the 2025 shareholder letter — the first one not authored by Buffett since 1965. People read it closely. The reviews were cautiously positive. It was more operational, less philosophical. Shorter on the kind of one-liners that end up in finance textbooks. Whether that's a loss or just a different kind of clarity depends entirely on what you think Berkshire's job actually is going forward.
The stock hasn't moved dramatically since the transition. Maybe that's the market saying the handoff was clean. Maybe it's the market still pricing in Buffett-era expectations that Abel will eventually have to either meet or quietly renegotiate. The test will probably come with Abel's first major acquisition — the price he pays, the logic he articulates, the terms he accepts. That one deal will tell you more about what Berkshire becomes than anything written about the transition so far.
