Inside Dan Schulman’s war on the old Verizon

Detailed summary

The former PayPal CEO left a Montana ranch to shake up one of America’s most profitable companies.

At his first companywide meeting after becoming Verizon’s CEO in October 2025, Dan Schulman dispensed with the usual corporate pleasantries. Speaking without notes or slides, he delivered a message that employees of the telecommunications giant weren’t used to hearing from the top: Verizon had surrendered market share to AT&T, -T-Mobile, and lower-cost providers, and its sprawling bureaucracy had become a problem. The company was losing badly. And, he warned, layoffs were coming.

It was a stark introduction to a new leader who, until recently, had been watching the deterioration unfold from a seat on Verizon’s board. Then 67, he had left an idyllic retirement in Montana to roll up his sleeves and fix it.

Schulman had at first been reluctant to take the top job, turning down the offer twice. But he also felt a sense of responsibility to its customers, shareholders, and employees. Should the board have acted sooner? “Yes, we probably should have,” he concedes. Ultimately, his wife persuaded him that he could make a difference. “I came in with a little bit of a bad attitude,” he says, but adds that now he’s “absolutely loving it.”

He also came in determined to dismantle the bureaucracy that had made even simple decisions needlessly complicated. The company, he says, had become “a big lumbering giant that had fallen behind.” In some cases, approving a decision required 35 signatures.

Verizon’s competitive troubles were mounting, too. In 2024, T-Mobile added a net 3.1 million postpaid phone lines and AT&T added 1.65 million; Verizon added less than 900,000. In the first three quarters of 2025, Verizon’s consumer business lost a net 414,000 postpaid phone lines, including 356,000 in the first quarter alone. Verizon remains the largest U.S. wireless carrier, generating billions in profits. But as its peers have narrowed the gap in network quality, the advantage that once let Verizon command a premium is becoming a baseline expectation for any major wireless carrier.

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