When Dan Schulman took over as Verizon’s chief executive in October 2025, he ditched the polished slide deck at his first companywide meeting and delivered an unvarnished message: the telecom giant was losing. AT&T and T-Mobile were taking market share, a bloated bureaucracy was suffocating decisions, and layoffs were coming.
Schulman had already turned down the job twice. At 67, he was enjoying retirement on a Montana ranch after a decade running PayPal. His wife eventually convinced him he could still make a difference. He now says he is “absolutely loving it,” but his early months have been anything but gentle.
The scale of the problem
Verizon’s numbers told a sobering story. In 2024, T-Mobile added 3.1 million postpaid phone lines and AT&T added 1.65 million, while Verizon added fewer than 900,000. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, the consumer business lost 356,000 postpaid phone lines. The company that once commanded a price premium for its network was watching rivals close the coverage gap.
Inside the company, even simple decisions could require 35 signatures. Schulman describes Verizon as “a big lumbering giant that had fallen behind.” His first priority was to strip out layers of management and force the organisation to move faster.
Cost cuts and layoffs
A month after his appointment, Verizon cut roughly 13,000 jobs, about 13% of the workforce. Schulman says he wanted to send a clear signal that this turnaround would be different from previous management resets. The savings are meant to fund lower prices and better customer incentives.
One of his early moves was to cancel a planned price increase. Verizon also introduced a Simplicity plan that lowers the starting monthly price for a single line from $65 to as low as $30. The company is also pushing customers to bundle wireless service with home internet, hoping to reduce the churn that has plagued it for years.
Early signs of life
The strategy appears to be gaining traction. In the third quarter of 2026, Verizon gained a net 406,000 phone lines, compared with just 44,000 a year earlier, its strongest third-quarter performance in five years. It also added 137,000 customer accounts, its best quarterly result in more than a decade, while cutting promotional spending by 41%.
Schulman is pushing executives to set harder targets rather than sandbagging goals they know they can hit. He recounts a manager proudly proposing to lift a sales closing rate from 15% to 25%. Schulman asked whether that still meant losing three out of four potential customers. "Anytime the pace of change external is greater than the pace of change internal," he says, "you're falling behind."
AI and new rivals
The turnaround is not only about winning back phone customers. Schulman sees artificial intelligence as both a threat and an opportunity. Verizon is investing in the high-capacity fiber networks that connect data centres, signing agreements with cloud providers worth billions. Internally, AI tools are helping customer service staff find information faster and shortening the in-store phone buying process.
Another challenge is SpaceX. Elon Musk's company spent $8 billion in October on low-band cellular spectrum, a purchase that could lay the groundwork for a direct challenge to incumbent wireless carriers. Schulman says he takes the threat seriously but argues that building a network to match Verizon's could take four to six years and cost around $300 billion.
What comes next
Schulman's turnaround is still in its early stages. He has reshaped the management culture, cut costs and stopped the bleeding in subscriber numbers. But turning a company the size of Verizon is likened by one director to "turning an ocean liner at the speed of a race car."
The real test will be whether Verizon can keep growing customers without giving away the store through discounts, and whether it can translate its network strength into a position in AI infrastructure. Schulman has shown he is willing to be unpopular to force change. Whether that is enough to restore Verizon's leadership will become clearer over the next year.
