Charlie Munger’s death not expected to change Warren Buffett’s succession plans for Berkshire Hathaway

Charlie Munger’s death — which sent shockwaves through Wall Street — is not expected to impact succession plans for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Though the Omaha, Neb.-based investing giant is reportedly unlikely to replace Munger’s role as vice chair, Buffett had already named his heir apparent, longtime executive Greg Abel.

Abel, 61, currently chairs Berkshire’s Iowa-based utilities subsidiary, Berkshire Hathaway Energy. He also serves as vice chair for non-insurance operations at Berkshire, according to a biography on the company website.

It was Munger who unexpectedly revealed Abel as Buffett’s successor at Berkshire’s 2021 annual meeting.

In response to a question about whether the company would be too complex to manage, Munger, then 97, simply said: “Greg will keep the culture.”

Onlookers assumed that this meant Abel would nab the top job upon Buffett’s passing, which the billionaire confirmed to CNBC shortly thereafter.

“The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett, now 93, told the outlet at the time.

“If, heaven forbid, anything happened to Greg tonight then it would be Ajit,” he added, referring to Ajit Jain, 72, the vice chair of Berkshire’s insurance operations.

Buffett cited age as a determining factor for deciding that Berkshire’s $300 billion-plus portfolio would be entrusted to one of the two men in the future.

At the time of the announcement, in 2021, Abel and Jain were 58 and 69, respectively.

“They’re both wonderful guys. The likelihood of someone having a 20-year runway though makes a real difference,” Buffett told CNBC at the time.

For some 15 years before this interview, the question of who would take over after Buffett was a source of speculation.

Though many thought Abel and Jain would both be in the running since they were promoted to vice chairmen in 2018, David Sokol was widely considered the front-runner as Buffett’s successor for some time.

Sokol was the chair of MidAmerican Energy, which Berkshire bought in 1999, and stepped up to run jet charter business NetJets, which Berkshire acquired the year prior, after joining Buffett’s orbit.

However, Sokol abruptly resigned from Berkshire in 2011 after it was revealed that he bought a $10 million stake in chemicals firm Lubrizol — shortly before recommending that Berkshire buy the company and netting $3 million in profit from the transaction.

He reportedly misled Buffett’s company about the timing and nature of his investment, according to a report published by the audit committee of the Berkshire board at the time.

Attention then turned to Abel, a Canadian who graduated from the University of Alberta in 1984 with a degree in commerce.

Abel began his decade-long tenure at Berkshire as a public accountant at green-energy leader CalEnergy, which acquired MidAmerican Energy in 1999 — the company that was scooped up by Berkshire for $2.05 billion cash that same year.

Abel rose to the top of MidAmerican in 2008. The company was renamed to Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014.

By 2018, Abel scored a seat on Berkshire’s board, and was named vice chair of the conglomerate’s non-insurance operations.

Munger praised Abel at Berkshire’s annual meeting in February as “just sensational at being a business leader, both as a thinker and as a doer.”

“He’s also just a tremendous learning machine — you can argue that he’s just as good as Warren at learning all kinds of things,” Munger added during the meeting, which was earlier reported on by Business Insider.

“There’s some things he’s better at than Warren is, and Warren knows that, and he just keeps dumping on Greg everything that Greg can do better, and that’s a lot,” Munger continued.

Buffett addressed his successor in a recent press release detailing the company’s future, including the billionaire’s hefty donation of roughly $866 million worth of Berkshire stock to four family charities.

“We have the right CEO to succeed me and the right board of directors,” Buffett wrote on Nov. 21.

Buffett is the world’s ninth richest person, with a $121 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Representatives for Abel at Berkshire Hathaway Energy did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.