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.
As if Verizon’s existing challenges weren’t daunting enough, Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, purchased an $8 billion portfolio of low-band cellular spectrum licenses in October, a move that lays the groundwork to compete more directly with traditional wireless giants.
A great network is no longer enough
For years, Verizon summed up its pitch to American consumers in a familiar TV refrain: “Can you hear me now? Good.” The commercials featured a bespectacled Verizon employee, played by actor Paul Marcarelli, roaming the country and testing his service in remote locations. The catchphrase became a cultural touchstone, helping cement Verizon’s reputation for network reliability.
But over time, that advantage became harder to monetize as network coverage became less of a differentiator and consumers increasingly judged carriers on the overall customer experience, from their monthly bills to the deals available when they needed a new phone. “Customers don’t want to pay for a great network; that’s the expectation,” says Kevin Zavaglia, Verizon’s chief commercial officer for sales and service. (Adding insult to injury, Marcarelli resurfaced in 2016 as pitchman for rival Sprint, this time touting its network.)
Just over a year into Schulman’s tenure, Verizon is showing early signs of a turnaround. In the third quarter, it gained a net 406,000 phone lines, compared with just 44,000 a year earlier, its strongest third-quarter showing in five years. It also added 137,000 customer accounts, its best quarterly performance in more than a decade, even as the company slashed spending on promotional offers by 41%.
The results offer a promising snapshot, but Schulman is attempting something far more ambitious than a rebound in subscriber growth: He is trying to dismantle decades of ingrained habits at one of America’s largest companies, forcing his near-93,300 employees to think differently, take risks, and move faster. The greatest danger, Schulman says, is inertia as AI and new competitors threaten to reshape the wireless business.
One tendency he encountered at Verizon was managers setting goals they were confident they could meet, then treating hitting those targets as success. Schulman recalls a manager proudly presenting a plan to raise a sales closing rate from 15% to 25%. “So, are you saying at the end of that, we are losing 75% of the time?” Schulman asked incredulously.
He’s pushing executives to set more ambitious goals, even if that means missing some targets, rather than consistently meeting easy ones. “Anytime the pace of change external is greater than the pace of change internal,” he says, “you’re falling behind.”
Tony Skiadas, Verizon’s chief financial officer, described how the company’s pricing strategy had become a costly cycle. Verizon had raised prices, contributing to customer defections, then spent heavily on promotions to win customers back. “We’ve seen that movie before over the years, and we know how it ends,” he says.
Roxanne Austin, a Verizon director, recalls watching the company finish third among the major wireless carriers for 20 consecutive quarters, losing customers and market share while management kept prioritizing network infrastructure over customers’ changing needs. “I’m like, ‘Guys, we’ve got to pay attention. Something’s happening,’ ” she remembers thinking. “Our playbook didn’t change for five years.” (Hans Vestberg, Verizon’s CEO from 2018 to 2025, declined to comment.)
Austin likens the scale and urgency of Schulman’s turnaround task to “turning an ocean liner at the speed of a race car.” And given the complexity of telecommunications, she adds, he must somehow “land that ocean liner on the moon, too.”
Back in the saddle
After stepping down as PayPal’s CEO in 2023 after nearly a decade at the helm, Schulman had settled happily into retirement on a Montana ranch. He rode horses daily, helped herd the couple’s roughly 900 head of cattle, and spent time with his children. Schulman, who was originally from New Jersey but had worn cowboy boots since eighth grade, finally had the lifestyle to match his footwear. “I did not miss the CEO job at all,” he says. Now, back on an executive’s grueling schedule, Schulman wants to make every hour count.
The mantra for the company’s new era under Schulman is familiar corporate gospel: Put customers first. But living up to it will require fundamental shifts at Verizon, including sacrificing some short-term revenue to rebuild customer trust. One of Schulman’s early decisions was to cancel a planned price increase. Verizon is also looking to compete more aggressively for customers with deals like the new Simplicity offering, which lowers the starting monthly price for a single line from $65 to as low as $30. And to reduce churn, it is offering incentives for customers to bundle cell phone service with home internet, including its Fios service.
Schulman made steep cost cuts, including the promised layoffs: A month after his appointment Verizon cut roughly 13,000 jobs, or about 13% of the workforce. Verizon had conducted smaller rounds of layoffs before, but Schulman wanted to send a stronger signal. “I really needed to show that this was different,” he says. “That I was very serious about the change that was going to happen.”
Schulman has set uncompromising expectations. He demands intensity, long hours, and a willingness to make difficult decisions. He expects managers to know their businesses inside out and answer questions on the spot. In meetings, when executives suggest taking a discussion offline, he challenges them: “Why would we take it offline? Like, we’re all here.”
Schulman readily describes himself as competitive and exacting of his employees, and he accepts that some may find his leadership style too demanding and leave. “And I’m okay with it, one way or another,” he says. As he puts it, “Heaven and hell are the same place. It’s just heaven for some and hell for others.”
Building for what comes next
The growing demand for infrastructure to support artificial intelligence offers new opportunities for Verizon, particularly in providing the high-capacity fiber networks connecting data centers. Verizon has signed agreements with Google, Amazon Web Services, and others worth billions, Schulman says.
AI is also helping improve systems within Verizon—for example, tools that help customer service employees quickly find information about plans, products, and policies. Zavaglia says AI has cut about six minutes from the in-store phone buying process.
As for Musk’s threat to challenge the incumbents in the mobile business, Schulman says he takes SpaceX’s ambitions “quite seriously.” But he estimates that building a network to rival Verizon’s would could take four to six years and cost some $300 billion. SpaceX also has other businesses competing for investment and attention, he points out. And even if Musk commits the resources, Schulman argues, he could end up with a network much like Verizon’s, without a significant cost advantage.
“Frankly, at that point, I welcome the opportunity to compete against them,” Schulman said during Verizon’s quarterly earnings call in October. “It’s very hard to throw a punch against something that doesn’t exist. But once they come into the market, we will be ferociously competitive.”
This article appears in the December 2026/January 2027 issue of Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
