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’

Dan Schulman thought he had traded the corner office for cowboy boots for good. 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. He was happy, in love, and had no desire to return to the grueling CEO schedule.

So when his fellow Verizon board members came calling for him to step in as CEO, he said no. Several times.

But the telecommunications giant was losing market share, falling behind competitors, and struggling with a bureaucracy . Eventually, a sense of obligation—and some convincing from his wife—brought him out of retirement to take the top job in October 2025.

“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 . 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. The early numbers are moving his way.

The former PayPal chief had stepped down in 2023 and retirement gave him plenty of time to embrace his inner cowboy. The New Jersey native had been wearing cowboy boots since eighth grade, long before he had a ranch—or cattle—to go with them.

“I really didn’t want to come back into the CEO job,” he said. “These jobs are all-consuming. You’re putting in 10 to 14 hours a day.”

Verizon, as it turns out, knows a thing or two about making repeat calls. Although Schulman may have been ready to hang up on corporate life, it wasn’t ready to part ways with him just yet.

He had sat on Verizon’s board since 2018 and had been its lead independent director since December 2024. He knew the management team, understood the business, and had watched the company struggle to compete. He was already the board’s backup plan.

“I was the hit-by-the-bus scenario,” he said. 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. Once first in its industry by market capitalization, it had fallen to last, and its longtime reputation for having a superior wireless network was no longer enough to keep customers from looking elsewhere.