Buffett confirms Greg Abel as successor at Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett confirmed that Greg Abel would succeed him as CEO if he were to depart the post.

"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 of Abel, Berkshire's vice chairman of noninsurance business operations, during the company's annual shareholder meeting.

The revelation that Abel was in line to take over for Buffett was hinted at as Executive Vice Chairman Charlie Munger answered a question on whether the company could become too complex to manage. Munger said Berkshire is not getting too big to manage because it is "so excessively decentralized."

"Decentralization won't work unless you have the right kind of culture," Munger said. "Greg will keep the culture."

"We've always, at Berkshire, had basically a unanimous agreement as to who should take over the next day," Buffett said later. "The world's paying more attention now."

At Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Abel has led a division with vast energy and utility holdings, including PacifiCorp, MidAmerican Energy and NV Energy. The division also recently added to its natural gas transmission business in 2020 with the purchase of Dominion Energy's gas transmission and storage business.

Abel during the meeting defended Berkshire Hathaway Energy's $8.3 billion proposal to build new generating capacity in Texas in the wake of the massive power failures caused by the winter storms in February. Abel's statements came after Elon Musk said Berkshire Energy's plan was "crazy" and that his plan to use Tesla Inc.'s Megapacks to store emergency power was the right course.

"Our proposal is really based upon the fact that the health and welfare of Texans were at risk and we needed to have, effectively, an insurance policy in place for them that if they needed the power on very short notice, it would be able to be dispatched," Abel said.

Abel said the fundamental concept of Berkshire Energy's proposal is that if a new and better proposal was brought forward, then the company did its job.

"If Texas, or Elon, or someone else comes up with a better proposition, we've always said, 'Texas, you should pursue it,'" he said.