Verizon's new CEO Dan Schulman has ordered the elimination of roughly 13,000 positions and vowed to dismantle a lumbering bureaucracy that has driven subscriber losses and stalled innovation.
In the third quarter of 2026, Verizon posted its strongest quarterly growth in five years, adding 406,000 phone lines and 137,000 customer accounts while slashing promotional spending by 41%.
He is pushing executives to set more ambitious targets, even if some fall short, and he warns that internal change must keep pace with rapid external disruption in the wireless market.
A month after his appointment, Verizon cut about 13,000 jobs, marking a decisive break from earlier, incremental downsizing, while also canceling a planned price increase and launching lower-price plans such as Simplicity that start at $30 per line.
SpaceX's $8 billion spectrum acquisition threatens to introduce a new competitor, though Verizon estimates building a rival network would take years and billions, and the company is seizing AI-driven fiber opportunities with multi-billion-dollar deals from cloud providers and AI tools that shave minutes off customer service processes.
Schulman's customer-first mantra requires sacrificing short-term revenue to rebuild trust, demanding long hours, tough decisions, and a willingness to let some employees leave as the company attempts to transform from a slow-moving giant into a nimble competitor.