Greg Abel has been CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for roughly two months, and he’s already doing the financial equivalent of showing up to a first date with flowers, a fancy reservation, and a printed list of his best qualities. On Thursday, Abel disclosed to CNBC that he personally bought $15 million in Berkshire stock (his entire after-tax annual salary) while the company simultaneously announced it had resumed share buybacks for the first time since 2024. The market gave him a polite 1% nod.
The optics are… fine(?). The subtext is a little messier.
Abel framed both moves as confidence signals during a leadership transition, which is reasonable enough given Berkshire shares are down 10% from their record high and operating earnings just posted a near 30% decline. When your inheritance includes a $373 billion cash pile and investors itching for you to do something with it, a buyback and a personal stock purchase is at least a something. But the speed of it, barely sixty days into the job, reads less like conviction and more like a man who saw the quarterly numbers and decided he needed to get ahead of the narrative fast.
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The more interesting wrinkle is how thoroughly Warren Buffett is still in the room. Abel told CNBC that The Oracle is still in the office 5 days a week, and even called Warren before his personal stock purchases. The company disclosed the buybacks specifically because of “the transition of leadership,” per Abel, a framing that only makes sense if the transition isn’t quite complete yet. When CNBC’s Becky Quick asked what Buffett and the board thought of the whole salary reinvestment plan, Abel reported they said “This is so Berkshire,” which is either an adorable vote of confidence or Abel’s weid fantasy of Warren and his board cosplaying as Mean Girls who say one thing but totally mean, like, the opposite.
Abel says he wants to run the place for 20 years. At some point, he’s going to have to do it for a few months all by himself.
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