Verizon cut more than 13,000 jobs in November 2025, the largest layoff round in its history, under a CEO who says he took the job only after turning it down several times. Dan Schulman, one year into a three-year turnaround plan, told Fortune he's now "absolutely loving it and pretty hopeful about our future." Behind that shift sits a company with $138 billion in annual revenue that had been losing market share for roughly five years.

Why did a retired PayPal chief take the Verizon job?

Schulman thought he had left corporate life for good. He stepped down as PayPal's CEO in 2023 after nearly a decade running the payments giant, and retired to a Montana ranch with his wife, Summerly, and roughly 900 head of cattle. He was happy. He had no interest in returning.

"I really didn't want to come back into the CEO job," he told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. "These jobs are all-consuming. You're putting in 10 to 14 hours a day."

Verizon's board kept calling anyway. Schulman had sat on the board since 2018 and had served as its lead independent director (the non-executive who represents shareholders between CEO and chair) since December 2024. He knew the business. He was already the contingency.

"I was the hit-by-the-bus scenario," he said. If anything had happened to then-CEO Hans Vestberg, "I would go in temporarily."

The company he would inherit was struggling. Verizon had lost market share for about five years, Schulman said. Once first among its industry peers by market capitalization (total stock market value), it had slipped to last. Its reputation for a superior wireless network no longer kept customers from leaving. "We had the lowest P/E, which is what the Street thinks of our future growth potential," he said, referring to the price-to-earnings ratio investors use to price growth expectations.

What was 'Plan B'?

Schulman acknowledged the board probably should have acted sooner. It had a plan for the company's problems. That plan didn't deliver. Quoting his father, he said: "People plan, God laughs."

"We had a plan. It didn't work out, so we had to go to Plan B, which was me, not Plan A," he said.

He still believed Verizon had the assets to recover, including what he estimated at 150 million customer lines. In the end, it was Summerly who convinced him, reminding her husband he could still make a difference. "I felt an obligation," he said. He took the top job in October 2025 — and, by his own admission, not cheerfully. "I came in with a little bit of a bad attitude," he said.

How did he shake up the company?

He refused to ease in. At his first all-employee meeting, speaking without notes or slides, he delivered a blunt diagnosis: Verizon had become a "big, lumbering giant that had fallen behind," with a hierarchical culture, slow decisions, and processes that required roughly 35 signatures to move anything forward. He also warned that layoffs were likely.

Weeks later, they came. The November 2025 cuts exceeded 13,000 jobs. Verizon had shed 2,000 or 3,000 people annually before, often through voluntary buyouts, Schulman said. He framed the bigger cut as both a funding mechanism for reinvestment and a signal.

"I needed to show this was different, that I was very serious about the change that was going to happen," he said. "Playing to win is not just a slogan for me or a nice marketing thing."

The strategy targets Verizon's risk-averse culture, replacing it with one that experiments faster and puts customers ahead of internal process. The network remains "foundational to everything we do," he said, but "it can't be about the network. It has to be about the customer."

Are the numbers moving?

Early results favor him. In the third quarter of 2026, Verizon added a net 406,000 postpaid phone lines (the contract subscriptions carriers prize most), up from 44,000 a year earlier. Promotional costs to acquire customers fell 41%. Free cash flow (cash generated after capital spending) rose 12% to $7.8 billion.

Part of the gain came from breaking an industry habit of buying growth with free phones. "A free line is not really a net add from my perspective," Schulman said.

The turnaround isn't finished. He expects it to take three years, and the company has extended his contract through December 2028 to see it through. The ranch will have to wait.

Asked how he'll judge his tenure when he hands Verizon to a successor, Schulman pointed first to customer trust, then to pride inside a company many had written off as too big and too bureaucratic to change. "We're surprising a lot of people right now," he said, "and it feels good when that happens."