In times of volatility, I often re-read the teachings of Warren Buffett. Although Buffett is becoming much less active at age 94 and no longer making speeches or giving lots of CNBC interviews, if you follow Berkshire Hathaway, don’t miss this in-depth , who is set to be the eventual next CEO. After reading it, it’s easy to understand why Buffett picked him to be his successor. Highly-intelligent but humble, extremely self-motivated but with good people-skills, working-class background, entrepreneurial since childhood, the list goes on. Here’s an excerpt:
It would surprise almost no one to learn that the man Buffett anointed to succeed him boasts a folksy, super-likable personality; those who know Abel say he has a touch of Warren, minus the showmanship his boss is famous for. Abel grew up in Edmonton, the Canadian prairie town nicknamed the nation’s “oil capital” and famed for its boom-to-bust cycles. His mother was a homemaker who doubled at times as a legal assistant, and his father sold fire extinguishers. “Sometimes people had jobs, and sometimes they didn’t,” Abel recalled in an interview for the Horatio Alger Association, a group that provides scholarships for severely underprivileged students, of which he’s been a strong supporter. “But with your family and good friends you had the opportunity to dream.”
His first business venture consisted of distributing advertising fliers to homes while pedaling his bike around town, earning the rate of a quarter of a penny per delivery. Young Greg—a photo shows him sporting a shaggy Beatles-style hairdo—advanced to collecting discarded pop bottles. He’d keep finding better and better bike routes home from school for spotting the throwaways. He’d grab as many as five per trip, and by the weekend fill his room with 20, worth $1. In high school, he labored filling fire extinguishers for his dad’s employer.
Also included was a cool infographic about all the companies owned partially and outright by BRK (even if the creator did mispell “Berkshire”). Not everyone knows they own Duracell batteries, Brooks running shoes, Forest River RVs, and Benjamin Moore paints.
I’ve picked up shares of Berkshire Hathaway in bits and pieces over the years. If a brokerage bonus gave me a choice, it was always BRKB shares for me. I set aside a certain slice of my cashflow for my self-directed portfolio, and if nothing else looked good but BRK was buying back its own shares, I’d buy BRKB too. Over time, it’s grown to a significant size, enough to wonder if I should keep it given the fact that Buffett won’t be around forever. However, it seems like Buffett has done his best to find someone to “keep the culture” and I expect to hold on for the foreseeable future. I wonder if Greg Abel will open up more to the public as time goes on.
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