Verizon cut roughly 13,000 jobs — about 13% of its workforce — just one month after Dan Schulman became CEO in October 2025, and he says the scale was deliberate. "I really needed to show that this was different," Schulman told Fortune. "That I was very serious about the change that was going to happen."

The cuts followed a blunt debut. At his first companywide meeting, Schulman spoke without notes or slides and told employees what the top of the company had rarely admitted: Verizon had lost market share to AT&T, T-Mobile and cheaper rivals, its bureaucracy had become a burden, the company was losing badly — and layoffs were coming.

How bad had it got?

The numbers explain the urgency. In 2024, T-Mobile added a net 3.1 million postpaid phone lines (contracts billed monthly, the industry's core metric) and AT&T added 1.65 million. Verizon added fewer than 900,000. In the first three quarters of 2025, Verizon's consumer business lost a net 414,000 postpaid phone lines, 356,000 of them in the first quarter alone.

Verizon is still the largest U.S. wireless carrier and generates billions in profits. But rivals have narrowed the network-quality gap, so the premium Verizon once charged for superior coverage has become a baseline expectation. "Customers don't want to pay for a great network; that's the expectation," says Kevin Zavaglia, Verizon's chief commercial officer for sales and service.

Then a new threat arrived. In October, Elon Musk's SpaceX bought an $8 billion portfolio of low-band cellular spectrum licenses (the radio frequencies that carry mobile signals), laying the groundwork to compete directly with the wireless giants.

Inside the company, decision-making had calcified. Schulman inherited a bureaucracy where some approvals required 35 signatures, and he describes the firm as "a big lumbering giant that had fallen behind." One habit he found: managers set goals they knew they could hit, then celebrated hitting them. Schulman recalls an executive proudly pitching a plan to lift a sales closing rate from 15% to 25%. "So, are you saying at the end of that, we are losing 75% of the time?" he asked.

His operating principle is simpler: "Anytime the pace of change external is greater than the pace of change internal, you're falling behind."

Is the turnaround working?

Just over a year in, the early evidence is positive. In the third quarter, Verizon gained a net 406,000 phone lines, versus 44,000 a year earlier — its strongest third quarter in five years. It added 137,000 customer accounts, its best quarterly result in more than a decade, even while slashing promotional spending by 41%.

CFO Tony Skiadas says the old pricing model had become a costly loop: raise prices, lose customers, then spend heavily on promotions to win them back. "We've seen that movie before over the years, and we know how it ends," he says.

Director Roxanne Austin watched the company finish third among major carriers for 20 straight quarters while management kept prioritizing network infrastructure over changing customer needs. "I'm like, 'Guys, we've got to pay attention. Something's happening,'" she remembers thinking. "Our playbook didn't change for five years." (Hans Vestberg, CEO from 2018 to 2025, declined to comment.) Austin likens Schulman's task to "turning an ocean liner at the speed of a race car" — and, given telecom's complexity, landing it on the moon.

What is Verizon actually changing?

Schulman, 67, had stepped down as PayPal's CEO in 2023 and retired to a Montana ranch, riding horses daily and helping herd about 900 head of cattle. "I did not miss the CEO job at all," he says. He turned down Verizon's offer twice before his wife persuaded him he could make a difference. He came in, he admits, "with a little bit of a bad attitude" — but says he's now "absolutely loving it." Does he think the board should have acted sooner? "Yes, we probably should have."

His playbook puts customers first, with real money behind it:

• He cancelled a planned price increase, sacrificing short-term revenue to rebuild trust.
• The new Simplicity plan cuts the starting monthly price for a single line from $65 to as low as $30.
• Verizon is pushing bundles of mobile service with home internet, including Fios, to reduce churn (customer defections).

He also demands intensity: long hours, instant answers, and no deferrals. When executives suggest taking a discussion offline, he pushes back: "Why would we take it offline? Like, we're all here." Some may find the style too demanding and leave. "And I'm okay with it, one way or another," he says. "Heaven and hell are the same place. It's just heaven for some and hell for others."

What about AI and Elon Musk?

Artificial intelligence cuts both ways for Verizon. On the revenue side, demand for high-capacity fiber connecting AI data centers has produced agreements with Google, Amazon Web Services and others worth billions, Schulman says. Internally, AI tools help service agents find plan and policy information faster — Zavaglia says they've cut about six minutes from the in-store phone-buying process.

On SpaceX, Schulman says he takes the threat "quite seriously" — but estimates a rival network would take four to six years and some $300 billion to build, with no guaranteed cost advantage at the end. "Frankly, at that point, I welcome the opportunity to compete against them," he said on Verizon's October earnings call. "It's very hard to throw a punch against something that doesn't exist. But once they come into the market, we will be ferociously competitive."

The bigger danger, in Schulman's view, is internal inertia as AI reshapes wireless. His roughly 93,300 remaining employees are being asked to take risks, move faster and miss ambitious targets rather than hit easy ones. One quarter of gains proves little. The ocean liner has barely turned.