Verizon Names Former PayPal Head Dan Schulman CEO
Hans Vestberg, who led the company since 2018, will stay on as an advisor for about a year.
Jake Neenan
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2025 – Former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is now the top executive at Verizon, the company announced Monday.
Former CEO Hans Vestberg will stay on as a “special advisor” through Oct. 4, 2026 to help with the transition. He’s been with Verizon since 2017 and served as CEO since 2018.
Schulman has been on Verizon’s board since 2018 and has been its lead independent director since December 2024. He’s been in leadership roles at AT&T and T-Mobile and founded Virgin Mobile.
“Verizon is at a critical juncture,” Schulman said in a statement. “We have a clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory, by growing our market share across all segments of the market, while delivering meaningful growth in our key financial metrics.”
He said the company would “maximize our value propositions, reduce our cost to serve, and optimize our capital allocation to delight our customers, and deliver sustainable long-term growth for our shareholders.”
Verizon has been facing tough competition from AT&T and T-Mobile in 2025, with the latter two carriers keeping up promotions last quarter. Verizon lost 407,000 postpaid lines in the first half of this year, worse than the first half of 2023 and 2024.
The company is, like the other major 5G providers, looking to expand its fiber network as fast as possible in a bid to offer bundled fixed and mobile broadband. To that end, Verizon inked a $20 billion deal to acquire Frontier, which would add more than 8 million fiber passings to Verizon’s more than 18 million.
“As the Board and I discussed, with the pending acquisition of Frontier, it is a good time to pass the baton to Dan. I do this with immense pride and deep gratitude,” Vestberg said in a statement. “Verizon’s future is in excellent hands, and I’ll be cheering the team on every step of the way.”
Vestberg also oversaw the company's major purchase of C-band spectrum, an effort to support its 5G network, in 2021. Verizon spent more than $45 billion in the Federal Communications Commission's auction, more than T-Mobile and AT&T combined.
The merger is pending, with the California Public Utilities Commission providing the most friction. The company recently got some good news on that front though, as the CPUC said it could resolve the matter before Department of Justice approval expires in February 2026.
Verizon is also reportedly interested in EchoStar’s AWS-3 spectrum licenses, which would give the company more airwaves to support its fixed wireless service. The carrier has more than 5.1 million fixed wireless subscribers, behind T-Mobile’s 7.3 million but ahead of AT&T’s 1 million. The service has been a means of competing with cable companies in areas where Verizon lacks fiber, something all three carriers have been successful with.
Member discussion