Verizon’s CEO turned down the job several times before leaving retirement on his ranch: ‘I came in with a little bit of a bad attitude’
“I came in with a little bit of a bad attitude,” Schulman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in the latest episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry.
Key points
- “Playing to win is not just a slogan for me or a nice marketing thing.” His strategy centers on replacing Verizon’s risk-averse culture with one willing to experiment, make decisions faster, and put customers ahead of internal processes.
- So when his fellow Verizon board members came calling for him to step in as CEO, he said no.
- Eventually, a sense of obligation—and some convincing from his wife—brought him out of retirement to take the top job in October 2025.
After nearly a decade running digital payments giant PayPal, he was enjoying retirement on a Montana ranch with his wife, Summerly, and roughly 900 head of cattle.
A reluctant return to the corner office The former PayPal chief had stepped down in 2023 and retirement gave him plenty of time to embrace his inner cowboy.
Additional details
- Verizon’s CEO cut 35-signature approvals and 13,000 jobs Once he accepted, Schulman wasn’t interested in easing into the job.
- If anything had happened to then-CEO Hans Vestberg, “I would go in temporarily.” Verizon had been losing market share for roughly five years, Schulman said.
- Despite his reservations, Schulman believed Verizon still had the assets to turn things around, including what he estimated at 150 million customer lines.
- A year later, he said, he’s “absolutely loving it and pretty hopeful about our future.” The reluctant hire is now one year into a three-year turnaround plan for Verizon, a Fortune 500 company with $138 billion in revenue last year.
- Verizon had become a “big, lumbering giant that had fallen behind,” he said, with a hierarchical culture, slow decision-making, and processes that required something like 35 signatures to move forward.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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