Berkshire Gurus Expect Abel to Shift Strategy With More Deals, Hands-On Management

Greg Abel is about to inherit one of the world's largest companies at a moment when the market is openly skeptical about whether he can fill the shoes of the man who built it. Berkshire Hathaway's stock has fallen 12% since Warren Buffett announced his retirement in early May, even as the S&P 500 climbed 11% in the same period. The company itself did not respond to requests for comment, but five prominent Berkshire watchers — investors, authors, and analysts who have spent years studying the conglomerate — offered a surprisingly unified view of what comes next: Abel will run the place differently, and probably better in some measurable ways.

Buffett spent six decades transforming Berkshire from a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion enterprise. He did this partly through a legendary ability to spot talent and delegate ruthlessly, but mostly through an almost monastic focus on capital allocation — deciding where to put money and when to hold it. He was famously hands-off with the subsidiaries he owned, trusting his managers to run their own shows. Abel, by contrast, is an operator. He spent his career running Berkshire's non-insurance businesses, which means he knows how to manage people, fix problems, and push underperforming units to perform better. Larry Cunningham, who directs the Weinberg Center at the University of Delaware and has written multiple books about Buffett, predicted that Abel would engage far more directly with struggling subsidiaries than his predecessor ever did. "Berkshire will become known for 'intelligent autonomy,'" Cunningham said — a phrase that captures the idea of giving managers freedom within a framework of much closer oversight.

Steven Check, who runs Check Capital Management and has held Berkshire stock for decades, made a similar argument: Abel is "more of a hands-on people manager than Buffett, whose number one interest was capital allocation." Check pointed to a 2014 shareholder letter from Charlie Munger, Buffett's late business partner, in which Munger called both Abel and Ajit Jain, who runs Berkshire's insurance operations, "world-leading" executives and suggested that "in some important ways, each is a better business executive than Buffett." That endorsement, made more than a decade ago, carries weight now.

The second major shift experts expect is a return to aggressive deal-making. Bill Smead, who founded Smead Capital Management and has invested in Berkshire for more than 30 years, said the company's "strength will probably be in buying whole companies because that will be Greg Abel's strength." Berkshire's acquisition history is long and storied — National Indemnity in 1967, See's Candies in 1972, Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1983, Geico in 1996, BNSF Railway in 2010, Precision Castparts in 2016, Alleghany in 2022, and Pilot Travel Centers through multiple transactions between 2017 and 2024. Last year alone, Berkshire generated $371 billion in revenue and $47 billion in operating profits. The company has become so large that finding acquisition targets that would meaningfully move the needle is genuinely difficult. Buffett himself said at this year's shareholder meeting that he would be willing to spend $100 billion on the right company. John Longo, a finance professor and author of "Buffett's Tips," predicted Abel would be more active in pursuing deals, and he also floated an idea that would have been unthinkable under Buffett: a dividend. Berkshire has never paid one, preferring to reinvest all earnings. But with an "enormous cash balance and strong free cash flow," Longo said, a modest dividend could "attract a new class of investors" and potentially fuel a stock rally.

Abel will not be alone. He has support from Jain, the insurance chief, and from Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, the two investment managers who oversee roughly $300 billion of Berkshire's stock portfolio. That portfolio includes major stakes in American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, and Chevron. Smead noted that Berkshire made a "biggest mistake" by not more publicly celebrating Combs and Weschler's track records as investors — doing so might have reassured shareholders about the transition and prevented some of the recent stock decline. Brett Gardner, an analyst and author of "Buffett's Early Investments," acknowledged that Buffett is "irreplaceable" but added that "with Abel, Berkshire is still in superb hands." He also noted that Buffett plans to remain as chairman and can "help if needed." The question now is whether the market will eventually agree.