Gregory Abel

He won the most closely watched succession race in corporate America. Now comes the hard part. In 2025 Warren Buffett formally announced he would hand over the reins of his storied company to Gregory Abel, after years of shaping him into a leader and company builder. The soft-spoken Abel was born in Canada and started out in accounting before joining a small geothermal firm 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. He is known as a more hands-on leader than his mentor, and some have speculated that he may delve deeper into running Berkshire’s many holdings, be it handpicking leaders or centralizing some operations. 

Read more: Meet the man picked to succeed Warren Buffett