Verizon Replaces CEO Vestberg With Former PayPal Chief Schulman

Verizon announced this week that CEO Hans Vestberg has been replaced “effective immediately” by former PayPal CEO and longtime telecom veteran Dan Schulman. Schulman has been on Verizon’s board since 2018. Before his CEO post at PayPal, which ran from 2014 to 2023, his telecom experience included positions at AT&T, Virgin Mobile and Sprint Nextel.

Vestberg’s new role will be as special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026, and he will remain on the board of directors until the next annual meeting.

Of the three major cellular carriers in the US, two have now shuffled their CEOs in the span of just two weeks. T-Mobile named former Chief Operating Officer Srini Gopalan its new CEO on Sept. 22, taking over from Mike Sievert. (Sievert is still CEO until Nov. 1, when Gopalan assumes the role.)

It’s unclear why Verizon is making this abrupt move now, just after the end of the third financial quarter of 2025 and three weeks before it releases the company’s earnings.

“2025 is shaping up to be an epically weird year for the wireless industry with tariffs, government cuts, yo-yoing labor market, and general economic malaise,” said Jason Leigh, senior research manager of 5G and mobility research at IDC, in an email to CNET. 

Leigh speculated that Verizon’s CEO shift could portend a strategic shift toward developing 6G technologies. “Everyone is still hunting for that transformative strategy that is going to realize the innovative and financial promise of the billions invested in 5G,” he said, adding, “before the crowbar goes into the wallet to start funding 6G deployments.” 

Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.

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This leadership change and its timing puts more pressure on Verizon’s upcoming quarterly earnings report, especially because the company has seen a lot of churn in customers within the past year. 

In June, I spoke with Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon’s consumer group (who would seem to be the expected replacement for the top role), about the company’s new Gemini AI-based customer service initiative. I asked him about the first quarter of 2025, when the company lost nearly 300,000 wireless customers, and he credited the fluctuation to “the seasonality of the business.”

In the second quarter of 2025, Verizon seemed to balance those numbers, but in different areas. It lost 51,000 wireless postpaid customers, added 50,000 wireless prepaid customers and 278,000 broadband customers.

Verizon is also in the middle of acquiring Frontier Communications, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026. The Federal Communications Commission approved the purchase in May 2025, but only after Verizon agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. 

Schulman has a record of standing up for policies not favored by the Trump administration, for example, when PayPal in 2016 stopped a planned expansion in North Carolina after the state passed a law requiring government buildings to make bathrooms single-sex only. In 2020, he spoke to CNET following the killing of George Floyd by police.