Greg Abel Takes Over Berkshire Hathaway: My Thoughts After Omaha 2026 – Ep 290

**Vitaliy Katsenelson** (0:06)
You're listening to The Intellectual Investor Podcast. To read this article online or to listen to more episodes, visit investor.fm. Greg Abel takes over Berkshire Hathaway, My Thoughts After Omaha 2026 Over the last few years, going to the BRK annual meeting has turned from something I do with friends into a family tradition, as both of my older kids, Jonah and Hannah, come with me to Omaha. Attendance this year was down considerably. In the past, getting a restaurant reservation was an ordeal. This time around, restaurants were only half full. Attendance at the event itself was probably down from 40,000 last year, by about half. The decline was not just driven by Buffett stepping down. A lot of international travelers did not come this year. Canadians are upset at the US for being belittled. I don't blame them. Europeans are upset about our president's comments on Greenland. I don't blame them either. This is what I hear from my Canadian and European friends who decided not to come to Omaha or to the conference my company hosts in Vale.
The BRK annual event is unlikely to draw 40,000 crowds ever again, but die-hard value investors will keep coming back. As I have mentioned dozens of times before, this weekend stopped being about Buffett or Munger, the year you could watch the meeting on TV from the comfort of your couch.
It is about people with similar values getting together, trying to learn from each other, sharing a meal, and celebrating the best of what capitalism has to offer. You can become anything you want, if you really put your mind to it and focus.
I hosted three Jeffersonian dinners this year. What is a Jeffersonian dinner? The format goes back to Thomas Jefferson, who hated the way large dinner parties fragmented into shallow side conversations. So, he designed an alternative. A dozen people at one table, one carefully chosen topic, and one conversation that everyone participates in. No side chatter. No breaking off into pairs. Everyone listens, everyone contributes, and the conversation goes deep instead of wide. These dinners have become annual events as well. This year I did something I had never done before. I interviewed Adam Anderson, the CEO of Innovex, a company we are a shareholder of, in front of an audience. The fireside chat was not recorded, but an attendee shared an AI generated summary. You can find a link in the show notes. My reader get-together has grown from half a dozen of us meeting in a hotel lobby 16 years ago, to about 800 people coming for a Sunday breakfast, Q&A in the Marriott Ballroom. I am very humbled. And to be honest, still struggling with imposter syndrome. I was pleased that we had almost a dozen book authors, some of them friends, selling and signing books around the event. This is going to become an annual tradition. Sunday morning breakfast. If you are in Omaha next year, mark your calendar. You can register for next year in a link in the show notes. Make sure to tell your friends. The event was recorded and I'll share the video next week.
Today, I am going to share my thoughts on BRK's new CEO, Greg Abel, which were published in Fortune magazine.
Is Greg Abel Abel?
Why BRK's new CEO is a better fit than Buffett today.
Last year, I came out of the BRK annual meeting and thought that Greg Abel was not the right person to run Berkshire Hathaway. Abel lacked Buffett's charisma, warmth and humor. I remember telling a friend that listening to him at the annual meeting was like listening to another consultant turned executive, proper, boring with a very narrow corporate speak vocabulary.
Greg Abel was not Buffett and he definitely was not Munger. I was wrong. Greg Abel is the right CEO for today's BRK.
Actually, a better person for BRK today than Buffett would be. My thinking changed when I started thinking about Tim Cook, who recently announced his retirement from the CEO position at Apple. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, but there is no other Steve Jobs. The probability of another Steve Jobs replacing Steve Jobs is nearly zero. As I look at Tim Cook's tenure, I can see that if he and Steve had run Apple together, the company could have been a lot more successful. Tim, as Jobs himself described him, is not a product guy. And so he failed to come up with another product of the iPhone's magnitude. The Apple car, which could have been that product, was a giant failure with several changes of direction and eventual disbandment. Apple Vision Pro felt half-baked. I'm not sure Steve Jobs would ever have released it. Siri, revolutionary when it launched on the iPhone, today has the IQ of a toaster compared to other AI models. Apple just settled a class-action lawsuit for exaggerating the AI capabilities of its newest iPhones. Elon Musk-like behavior. And yet, Tim Cook did an incredible job running Apple. Through small incremental improvements, he cemented the iPhone as an indispensable device. In the Jobs era, the Apple ecosystem was its biggest competitive advantage. Cook doubled down on it, with all devices working seamlessly together. He extended Apple's software advantage into hardware, abandoning Intel for in-house M-chips, which power MacBooks with multiples of the battery life of the Intel processors they replaced, without sacrificing performance. Apple is no longer the most creative company in Silicon Valley, but everything works. Apple's revenues are up nearly four times since Jobs passed away. I remember reading in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, that Jobs' advice to Cook, paraphrasing, was, Don't ask what Steve would do. Do you?