How Verizon’s CEO is rolling out his ‘play-to-win’ playbook—and fending off Elon Musk

In today’s CEO Daily: Verizon CEO Dan Schulman on his company’s on-going transformation.

The big leadership story: Anthropic targets an IPO valuation below earlier expectations

The markets: Mostly up after CoreWeave beat revenue estimates.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell writing this morning. Dan Schulman hates losing. For the past few years, he watched from his seat on Verizon’s board as the telecom giant lost market share, hobbled by internal bureaucracy and risk aversion.

“We were a big, lumbering giant that had fallen behind,” Schulman told me on the most recent episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors podcast, admitting the board should have moved faster to make a leadership change. “We had processes where you needed something like 35 signatures before you could move forward.”

Schulman, who had been the board’s “hit-by-a-bus” successor, was named CEO in October 2025. At his first all-hands, he spoke candidly, without slides or notes: Verizon was losing. Layoffs were necessary. (Schulman would cut more than 13,000 roles, the largest layoff in Verizon’s history.) The culture had to be redefined. And the company’s tech stack needed to be rebuilt from top to bottom. (Schulman estimates there will be 100 billion AI agents in the next few years, driving an explosion in data traffic and network demand.)

“Culture is the single........

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