What's Next for Berkshire Hathaway Under New Leadership? Three Stocks Suggest Abel's Investment Direction

A Leadership Transition and Its Implications

Berkshire Hathaway has officially entered a new era. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor who built this conglomerate into a powerhouse, has stepped aside from the CEO position, handing over control to Greg Abel as of the end of 2025. This transition raises a critical question for investors: will Berkshire’s portfolio strategy shift with this leadership change? While only time can provide the definitive answer, Abel’s background and existing investments offer compelling clues about which stocks might soon capture his attention.

Unlike his predecessor, Abel brings a different skill set to the table. His expertise in the energy sector gives us insight into potential investment moves that diverged from Buffett’s playbook. Let’s examine three companies that may well be positioned for increased interest under the new CEO’s watch.

Energy Roots: The Case for Deeper Involvement in Oil and Gas

Occidental Petroleum presents an intriguing opportunity for Berkshire’s new leadership. While Buffett consistently maintained that acquiring the entire oil and gas company made little strategic sense, Abel may view this situation through a different lens. His résumé tells a revealing story: before taking over at Berkshire Hathaway Energy, he served as an executive within the energy utility space during the company’s acquisition of CalEnergy/MidAmerican Energy back in 1999. This background means Abel is no stranger to energy sector dynamics.

Consider the numbers: Berkshire currently holds a substantial 27% stake in Occidental Petroleum. With the conglomerate sitting on an enormous cash reserve of $382 billion and faced with the ongoing challenge of deploying capital effectively—a problem that plagued Buffett’s later years—Occidental could emerge as a logical target for further investment. Abel’s energy expertise positions him well to evaluate whether expanding this position makes strategic sense.

Technology’s Evolution: A Fresh Perspective on Growth Investments

Buffett’s well-documented skepticism toward technology stocks never completely dissolved, though it did soften enough to permit a notable shift. During the third quarter of 2025, Berkshire acquired 17.8 million shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, representing roughly $5 billion in value. Even so, this represents less than 2% of Berkshire’s total equity portfolio—a cautious entry point by any measure.

Abel may not carry the same ideological resistance to the tech sector that defined Buffett’s investment philosophy. Where Buffett hesitated, Abel might see clarity. Additionally, Abel may embrace a different portfolio construction philosophy: rather than maintaining small, token positions across multiple names, concentrating meaningful capital in well-established growth companies with proven competitive advantages could align with his approach. Alphabet, having demonstrated both market dominance and growth potential, could easily attract additional capital under new management.

Infrastructure and Income: The Dividend Play Buffett Overlooked

Digital Realty Trust represents another compelling addition to this list of potential acquisitions—a category Buffett would have likely avoided but that may appeal to Abel’s analytical framework. Though unfamiliar to most household consumers, this company’s infrastructure is central to modern digital life. Digital Realty Trust operates more than 300 data centers globally, providing essential cloud computing capabilities and artificial intelligence solutions to major technology firms including Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM.

Structured as a real estate investment trust (REIT), the company distributes substantially all of its quarterly earnings to shareholders through dividends—a feature historically favored by Buffett, though perhaps underutilized in his final years. The current forward dividend yield stands at 3.1%. While dividend growth has stalled since 2022, the confluence of declining interest rates and anticipated acceleration in the company’s revenue trajectory suggests dividend expansion may materialize in the months and years ahead.

This combination of recurring cash flows, infrastructure exposure, and growth acceleration potential could resonate strongly with a CEO seeking both stability and expansion opportunities simultaneously.

The Road Ahead

The transition from Buffett to Abel represents more than a simple changing of the guard. It signals a potential evolution in Berkshire Hathaway’s investment philosophy—one that may embrace the energy sector more aggressively, technology opportunities more openly, and income-generating infrastructure plays more creatively. Whether these three stocks will actually receive increased capital allocation remains to be seen, but the logic supporting each is increasingly difficult to dismiss.