Warren Buffett’s Successor Started Out Selling Empty Soda Bottles for 5 Cents. Now He Runs Berkshire Hathaway

Greg Abel’s first taste of business came on two wheels in Edmonton, scanning the route home from school for empty soda bottles he could wash and redeem for 5 cents apiece. That small hustle is now part of the origin story of the man who became CEO of Berkshire Hathaway on 1/1/2026, the board’s unanimous pick to succeed Warren Buffett, who stayed on as chairman. Fortune captured the arc in a 1/5/2026 profile that traced Abel’s rise from bottle returns to billionaire executive. In his first shareholder letter, Abel didn’t pretend the transition would be easy: “Warren is obviously a very hard act to follow.”

A five-cent habit that stuck

Back in January, Fortune sketched a tidy origin story for Greg Abel: not a corner office, but a kid on a bike, scanning curbs for discarded glass. In the January 5, 2026 profile, Abel’s first taste of business came from collecting, cleaning, and redeeming empty soda bottles for 5 cents apiece.

He treated it like a system. Abel would optimize his route home from school to pick up more bottles, the kind of small operational tweak you hear later in boardroom lore, except this one happened on neighborhood streets in Edmonton. He also took on a paper route and other odd jobs, including distributing flyers, stacking early lessons about time, effort, and repeatable routines.

From Edmonton to the American power business

Abel was born Gregory Edward Abel on June 1, 1962, in Edmonton, Alberta, according to Britannica’s biography. In high school he worked part time at Levitt-Safety and played football, then graduated from the University of Alberta in 1984 with a bachelor of commerce degree.

After college, he began at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Edmonton before transferring to the firm’s San Francisco office, then joined CalEnergy, a geothermal electricity producer, in 1992. The pivotal corporate turn came in October 1999, when Berkshire Hathaway announced it was buying a controlling interest in the company, later renamed MidAmerican and ultimately folded into Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Abel went on to serve as CEO and executive chairman of that energy unit from 2008 to 2018.

Becoming Buffett’s successor, officially

The succession story turned from long-telegraphed to finalized when Berkshire Hathaway made Abel CEO on January 1, 2026. The board voted unanimously, while Warren Buffett remained chairman, as CBS News reported. Buffett put it plainly: “the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year-end.”

Abel was 63 at the handoff, following Buffett, then 95, after a six-decade run that reshaped Berkshire from a struggling textile maker into one of the world’s most successful companies. For American markets, it meant the Buffett era of day-to-day leadership had a date stamp, and investors had a new operator to study.

The first shareholder letter, and an early test

In late February 2026, Abel released his first letter to shareholders, landing with a concrete financial marker: a $4.5 billion write-down on the value of Berkshire’s Kraft Heinz and Occidental Petroleum stakes. The moment was notable not because it tried to mimic Buffett’s voice, but because it didn’t.

Abel acknowledged the comparison pressure directly, writing, “Warren is obviously a very hard act to follow.” For readers who track leadership the way they track earnings, that line, plus the late-February write-down, set the early outline of his tenure: pragmatic, numbers-forward, and comfortable admitting the shadow he’s working under.