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Warren Buffett’s announcement Saturday that he would be retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway came as a surprise to lots of people, including the person who was elected to succeed him the next day. Greg Abel has been Buffett’s right-hand man for many years and the public heir apparent for the past five, but Buffett, in making his announcement, said he hadn’t told Abel the moment was coming. Buffett, 94, will stay on as chairman at Berkshire Hathaway, but by the end of this year, Abel will be in the driver’s seatand will have a big legacy to follow. Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965. Things began to take off in 1978, when he convinced his friend Charlie Munger to come on board. Together, the two created a company that was the envy of the investing world. The price of Berkshire Class B shares (NYSE: BRK-B), the most widely held shares of the company, has gone up more than 2,000% since they began trading in 1996. The price of Class A shares (NYSE: BRK-A), held by Buffett and institutional shareholders, is up 42,413% since they began trading in 1985. Abel is fairly well known to people who closely follow Berkshire Hathaway, but he’s less familiar to people who only know Buffett. Here’s a look at the man who will try to fill Warren Buffett’s shoes. Who is Greg Abel? Abel, 62, currently serves as vice chair of non-insurance operations at Berkshire. He’s also the chair of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which Buffett called one of the company’s four “jewels” in his 2021 shareholder letter. (The other three are Berkshire’s property and casualty insurance businesses, Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, and the company’s stake in Apple.) He has been the designated successor to Buffett for at least four years and has joined Buffett onstage at the company’s investor meeting for the past several years, even before Munger’s death in November 2023. Away from the office, Abel is a huge hockey fan and serves as assistant volunteer coach for his son’s team in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. He’s said to have a quick wit and nurtures strong personal relationships. “Hes not loud or bombastic, but hes 500% friendly,” Mark Oman, a retired Wells Fargo executive and friend of Abel’s told Fortune. What is Greg Abel’s background? Abel started his career at the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting firm in Canada, eventually moving to the San Francisco office. He joined CalEnergy in 1992, which six years later would acquire Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy Holdings (which would eventually be renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy). He began running that company in 2009. In 2018, he was asked to join the Berkshire board. Why did Warren Buffett pick Greg Abel to succeed him at Berkshire Hathaway? Abel’s performance with Berkshire Hathaway Energy caught the eye of senior Berkshire executives. Through a series of acquisitions, he transformed that company into a major player in the power industry, with earnings of $5 billion in the first quarter of 2025. In 2023, Buffett told CNBC that Abel does all the work, and I take all the bows. He’s also seen, in many ways, as the spiritual successor to the plain-spoken, non-flashy Buffett, ensuring the culture at Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t change. What is Greg Abel’s investment strategy? Abel, when asked Saturday to compare his approach in dealing with Berkshire’s subsidiaries to Buffett’s, said he saw himself as “more active, but hopefully in a very positive way. Buffett jokingly offered a more succinct answer: “Better.” He added, “You really need someone that behaves well on top and is not playing games for their own benefit. Munger, in 2023, told CNBC that Abel was a tremendous learning machine and one could argue that hes just as good as Warren in learning all kinds of things. Abel’s not expected to pick the companies that go into the Berkshire portfolio. That will be handled by Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who already help Buffett with that.
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E-Commerce
Its not every day that a Republican from the Trump administration gets a standing ovation, or three, from a roomful of Democrats. But as Mike Pence showed on January 6, 2021, he doesn’t always stick to the party line. According to the former vice president, the attacks on the Capitol four years ago were ultimately unsuccessful and a triumph of freedom” because “our institutions held that day, not because of any one person, but because leaders in both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, did their duties, Pence said while receiving the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in Boston at the JFK Library on Sunday. Pence received the award for putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power. After repeated pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, Pence was to preside over Congress and the certification process, which includes counting the Electoral College votes, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the process. While the Secret Service urged him to evacuate, Pence, his wife, Karen, and their daughter Charlotte refused to leave the Capitol, coordinating with the military and congressional leaders during the attack. Once the Capitol was cleared, Pence resumed the certification process. In these divided times, in these anxious days, I know in my heart that we will find our way forward as one nation, Pence said, acknowledging the current Trump administrations agenda, without naming the president specifically. He added: It’s the Constitution that “binds us all together.” Unpopular positions, principled stands The awardnamed after President Kennedys 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, which recounts the stories of eight U.S. senators who risked their careers by taking principled stands for unpopular positionsis presented each year to public servants for making a courageous decision of conscience without regard for the personal or professional consequences. Kennedys daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and grandson, Jack Schlossberg, presented the award to Pence, acknowledging the new political climate of fear that has taken over in the last four months. We are especially grateful for your presence this year, as many are afraid to speak out or show up, Kennedy said. Its hard to believe that attending a black-tie gala could be described an act of couragebut here we are. President Kennedy called his time the hour of maximum danger and welcomed the challenge. We are living in a similar moment now. Just as President Kennedy famously stated, “my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” Caroline Kennedy said, now is the time to act because, as we have seen in the past 100 days, we can no longer take our democracy for granted.” “Everyone should be speaking their hearts” Those in attendance included Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who called Pence a profile in courage [for] standing up against a leader of his own party, and comedian David Letterman, who said, In this day and age, courage needs to be identified and celebrated in this way. It didnt use to be that way. When asked what Americans can do right now, Letterman told Fast Company: “They should be speaking their hearts. Everyone should be speaking their hearts. This was a moment when the vice president stood up for the constitution, and we have to all remember that today, U.S. presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told Fast Company. History shows that people working from the ground up are what make all the changes. So its at your local area, its in your state, its in your city. Every changewhether its civil rights, womens rights, gay rightshas come from the ground up. Thats what we need to do. Previous award recipients include former presidents Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and former Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
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E-Commerce
Stock prices for Netflix, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery fell this morning after President Trump took to social media to warn of major incoming tariffs for films made overseas. This Sunday, Trump used Truth Social to announce another escalation of his ongoing trade war. In the post, Trump claimed that Americas movie industry is dying a very fast death, as Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away. The president went on to call this rise of foreign production both propaganda and a national security threat, ending by stating that, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. Howard Lutnick, the U.S. commerce secretary, responded to Trumps rant with the brief note posted to X: Were on it. Neither Trump nor Lutnick provided any clarification on how such a tariff would be applied, or who might be affected. But this morning, production and streaming companies are already feeling the impact of Trumps proposed plan: Shares for Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global took a sharp decline in early Monday trading, although Disney has since quickly bounced back. A potential industry-wide “chilling effect” So far, Trumps announcement has left media experts scratching their headsand incited its fair share of backlash. First, its difficult to parse how an 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign lands would actually be implemented. Experts have noted that its unclear whether this tariff would apply only to foreign-language films imported to the United States or to any production shot overseas, including those led by major U.S. studios. Its also not apparent whether this move will affect streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, which host plenty of titles that are either fully foreign-made or produced in part in another country, and whether short-form content like TV shows will also be impacted. So many questions, Simon Pulman, an entertainment lawyer at Pryor Cashman, wrote on LinkedIn. Who is ultimately charged the tariff, and on what basis? Production spend? Distributor gross? Do you seek to hit the distributors and platforms that exhibit foreign-produced content? What about Netflix, whose titles do not generate direct revenue? What happens if production occurs offshore but post happens in the US? What about cross-border productions? It’s true that producers are filming more overseas In an interview with Fast Company, Pulman said that while the implementation of Trumps proposed plan is unknown, its main goal appears to be convincing major movie studios to bring production back to the U.S. In the wake of Hollywoods 2023 writer and actor strikes, its become more common for major Hollywood films (Gladiator II, the soon-to-be-released Mission: ImpossibleThe Final Reckoning, and several upcoming Avengers films, for example) to be produced at least partly overseas. Thats because, Pulman says, the strikes caused many production companies to reevaluate costs, while, simultaneously, foreign jurisdictions like the U.K., Hungary, and the Czech Republic began instating aggressive tax incentives for producers. Already, politicians and executives from Australia, New Zealand, France, and Italy have spoken out against Trumps plan. According to the nonprofit media tracker FilmLA, film and television production in Los Angeles has fallen by nearly 40% over the past decade. Given this offshoring trend, Pulman says, the idea of re-incentivizing production in the U.S. is laudable to some extent. But he thinks adding major tariffs to overseas production is more likely to both increase domestic ticket prices and decrease the number of movies being made rather than convincing American filmmakers to shoot in the U.S. To my knowledge, every jurisdiction, whether it’s a state in the U.S. or a country like France or Canada, they don’t achieve [more production] by penalizing companies that go offshore, Pulman says. They try to attract and incentivize companies to shoot in their jurisdictions by offering various benefits to them. The worst kind of Hollywood cliffhanger At this point, Pulman adds, its difficult to predict exactly how production companies will react to Trumps announcementbut he believes its most likely to have a chilling effect on the industry. The reality is, until we know the details, and until there’s actually some kind of plan here, we’re not going to have a true sense of what this means, Pulman says. But the challenge with that is it creates uncertainty. If you’re a major streamer or a major studio, you’ve got this potentially hanging over your head.
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E-Commerce
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