At the age of 94, Warren Buffett said he finally began slowing down.
“He just was so much more effective at getting things done, making changes in management where they were needed, helping people that needed help someplace, but just all kinds of ways. It was unfair, really, not to put Greg in the job.”
At the May 3 annual shareholders meeting, Buffett announced that he would step down by the end of the year.
Speaking to a stunned crowd, Buffett, now 94, said neither Abel nor the board (bar his two children, Susie and Howard) had been aware of his intention to leave the CEO position.
Buffett added that the next step was proposing the move to the board the following weekend, who would then convene in a few months to take action.
“I think they’ll be unanimously in favor of it, and that would mean that at year-end Greg would be the chief executive officer of Berkshire and I would still hang around and could conceivably be useful in a few cases,” Buffett added.
Despite the investment legend’s backing for Abel—and his promise to stay on at Berkshire—the conglomerate’s share price dipped on the news and is now down 4.7% over the past month.
“My health is fine, in the sense that I feel good every day,” he told the WSJ. “I’m here at the office and I get to work with people I love, they like me pretty well, and we have a good time.”
He continued, he could serve as a steadying hand in turbulent economic times: “I don’t have any trouble making decisions about something that I was making decisions on 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 60 years ago.
“I will be useful here if there’s a panic in the market because I don’t get fearful when things go down in price or everybody else gets scared. And that really isn’t a function of age.”
He added: “I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas. My interests are still the same.”
Abel will oversee Berkshire’s investment strategy while Buffett is still at the company, the chairman added, having proved his investment chops while overseeing the business’s push into infrastructure for generating electricity from green sources.
Under Abel’s supervision, Berkshire now ranks as America’s largest regulated utility for wind generation, operating wind farms in Texas, California, and across the Midwest, particularly in Iowa.
“He will have ideas,” Buffett said.
