I’m a Berkshire Hathaway investor and I was wrong about Greg Abel. Here’s why he’s a better fit than Buffett right now

Last year I came out of the BRK annual meeting and thought that Greg Abel was not the right person to run Berkshire Hathaway. Abel lacked Buffett’s charisma, warmth, and humor. I remember telling a friend that listening to him at the annual meeting was like listening to another consultant-turned-executive: proper, boring, with a very narrow corporate-speak vocabulary. Greg Abel was not Buffett and he definitely was not Munger. I was wrong. Greg Abel is the right CEO for today’s BRK — actually, a better fit for BRK today than Buffett would be. My thinking changed when I started thinking about Tim Cook, who recently announced his departure from the CEO position at Apple. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs. But there is no other Steve Jobs. The probability of another Steve Jobs replacing Steve Jobs is nearly zero. As I look at Tim Cook’s tenure, I can see that if he and Steve had run Apple together, the company could have been a lot more successful. Tim, as Jobs himself described him, “is not a product guy,” and so he failed to come up with another product of the iPhone’s magnitude. The Apple Car, which could have been that product, was a giant failure with several changes of direction and eventual disbandment. Apple Vision Pro felt half-baked — I’m not sure Steve Jobs would ever have released it. Siri, revolutionary when it launched on the iPhone, today has the IQ of a toaster compared to other AI models. Apple just settled a class-action lawsuit for exaggerating the AI capabilities of its newest iPhones. And yet, Tim Cook did an incredible job running Apple. Through small, incremental improvements, he cemented the iPhone as an indispensable device. In the Jobs era, the Apple ecosystem was its biggest competitive advantage — Cook doubled down on it, with all devices working seamlessly together. He extended Apple’s software advantage into hardware, abandoning Intel for in-house M chips, which power MacBooks with multiples of the b