From Buffett to Next‑Gen: How CEO Turnover and Younger Chiefs Are Reshaping the S&P 1500
•February 17, 2026
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Why It Matters
Rapid, youth‑driven CEO turnover reshapes governance risk and performance expectations, forcing investors and boards to reassess succession, compensation, and diversity strategies.
Key Takeaways
- •CEO turnover hit 12% in 2025, highest since 2010.
- •Average new CEO age fell to 54, youngest decade.
- •80% of new S&P 1500 CEOs are first‑time leaders.
- •Female CEO appointments dropped to 9% of new hires.
- •Tenure shrank to 7.1 years, accelerating board pressure.
Pulse Analysis
The surge in chief‑executive handoffs reflects a broader market recalibration. Boards are no longer content to wait out uncertainty; they are proactively replacing leaders to navigate AI‑driven business models, volatile trade flows, and heightened political risk. This acceleration has amplified the stakes of first‑year decisions, as new CEOs inherit complex, non‑traditional challenges that demand swift, data‑centric action. Consequently, investors are scrutinizing the quality of succession pipelines and the robustness of governance frameworks that support rapid leadership changes.
A striking demographic shift underpins the turnover wave. The average age of incoming CEOs fell to 54, and more than four‑fifths have never run a public company before. Younger executives bring digital fluency, cultural relevance, and a comfort with platform economics that older, finance‑centric leaders often lack. Boards view these attributes as essential for steering AI transformation, cyber resilience, and evolving employee expectations. Yet the trade‑off is a thinner résumé, with many newcomers lacking full P&L or crisis‑management experience, raising questions about depth of strategic foresight.
For investors, pension funds, and policymakers, the new leadership profile introduces fresh risk vectors. Compensation structures designed for decade‑long tenures may misalign with the emerging 7‑year average, while the decline in female CEO appointments—down to 9% of new hires—threatens diversity gains. Stakeholders must evaluate whether incentive plans, board oversight, and regulatory frameworks can adapt to a faster, younger, and less seasoned C‑suite. The ultimate test will be whether this generational bet translates into sustained value creation or amplifies volatility across the trillion‑dollar market cap landscape.
From Buffett to Next‑Gen: How CEO Turnover and Younger Chiefs Are Reshaping the S&P 1500
The great CEO handoff: one in nine, and climbing
Roughly one CEO in nine was swapped out last year among about 1,500 of the largest U.S. public companies, the highest replacement rate since at least 2010. That’s not just noise in the system; that’s a handoff at scale.
Across the S&P 1500 alone, 168 new chief executives were appointed in 2025, the biggest incoming class in more than a decade. Turnover rates have risen toward 12–13%, up from a sub‑10% lull just a year earlier, as boards accelerate succession decisions rather than waiting out uncertainty.
This churn has real weight. In the last quarter of 2025, companies with a combined market capitalization of around $1.3 trillion changed CEOs, including Verizon Communications and Yum Brands, parent of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Early 2026 brought another wave, touching firms worth about $2.2 trillion—almost half of that from Walmart alone.
Big names, fast moves: from Walmart to Disney
This isn’t just mid‑cap musical chairs. Some of the country’s most recognizable companies are switching out their top leaders, sometimes in carefully staged transitions, sometimes in sudden, sharp breaks with the past.
Retail is in the spotlight. Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and Lululemon Athletica all announced leadership changes in the opening weeks of the year. On a single February day, Disney, PayPal, and HP unveiled new chiefs, underscoring how compressed the timing has become.
Kroger tapped a former Walmart executive as its next leader, leaning into big‑box DNA to navigate food inflation and shifting consumer wallet share. Berkshire Hathaway, in contrast, executed the slowest handoff imaginable: Warren Buffett finally passed the baton to Greg Abel on January 1, years after publicly flagging him as heir apparent in 2021.
Then there are the hard pivots. CarMax removed Bill Nash after nine years amid slumping sales. HP elevated director Bruce Broussard to interim CEO as Enrique Lores prepares to take the top job at PayPal, effectively turning one transition into two. Biotech firm Codexis abruptly installed its CTO Alison Moore as chief executive and simultaneously cut nearly a quarter of its workforce—24%—in one stroke.
Leadership in a storm, not a spreadsheet
What’s different about this wave is not only how many CEOs are leaving, but what their successors are walking into. Boards aren’t just changing pilots; they’re changing them mid‑flight.
Executives taking over today face a bundle of nontraditional headaches: the rapid commercialization of artificial intelligence, rewiring of global trade flows, polarized domestic politics, and a geopolitical order that can turn on a drone strike or a single sanction announcement. These aren’t textbook “optimize margin, grow share” challenges; they’re messy, public, and often deeply political.
You can see that in the job Target just handed Michael Fiddelke. He succeeded Brian Cornell, who spent 11 years steering the retailer through e‑commerce disruption and a pandemic; within days of his official start date, Fiddelke had to record a video message to employees about federal immigration actions in Minneapolis, not a merchandising strategy. “This isn’t the first message I imagined I’d send,” he admitted—and you can almost hear every new CEO nodding along.
Even seemingly straightforward consumer brands feel these crosscurrents. Adolfo Villagomez, who took over 1‑800‑Flowers.com from its founder last May, describes post‑pandemic retail as an overlapping storm of supply chain distortions, channel shifts, and radically different customer expectations. The leadership toolkit that worked in 2015 is, bluntly, out of date.
CEOs are leaving earlier—and staying for less time
This isn’t just about new faces. It’s about timing. Veteran leaders are stepping aside sooner, and average tenures are shrinking.
Global data show CEO exits reached a record 234 in 2025, up 16 % from 2024 and more than 20 % above the recent eight‑year average. Average CEO tenure dropped to about 7.1 years in 2025, down from 7.4 years the year prior and below the 8‑plus‑year highs seen earlier in the decade.
Some exits, like Buffett’s after six decades at Berkshire Hathaway or Walmart’s Doug McMillon after more than ten years running the world’s largest retailer, were clearly long‑planned. Others look more opportunistic: boards using market stress, activist pressure, or strategic missteps as a trigger to reset leadership earlier than they might have in calmer periods.
The net effect? The “lifetime” of a CEO role is shortening. That compresses the window for impact, raises the stakes on first‑year decisions, and puts a premium on successors who can hit the ground not just running, but sprinting.
Younger chiefs, thinner résumés: the new profile
Here’s the sharpest break with the old model: the next generation of chiefs is younger and, on paper, less battle‑tested.
Incoming CEOs across large U.S. public companies averaged about 54 years old last year, down from nearly 56 for the prior incoming class and close to the lowest levels of the past decade. In parallel, global research shows the average age at hire for new CEOs dropping to roughly 52.9 years in 2025, compared with 54.3 the year before.
More striking is experience. Over 80 % of last year’s 168 new S&P 1500 chiefs were first‑time CEOs with no prior experience running a public company or major stand‑alone enterprise. About two thirds had never previously sat on a corporate board. That’s a huge structural shift in the leadership pipeline.
Take Paul Shoukry at Raymond James. The financial‑services firm promoted him from CFO to CEO at age 42, succeeding Paul Reilly, who was 55 when he stepped into the role back in 2010. Same chair, very different stage of career. Some boards see this as an advantage: younger leaders steeped in data, technology, and culture rather than only in capital allocation and M&A.
But “younger” doesn’t mean “unproven.” Josh D’Amaro, who’s slated to succeed Bob Iger at Disney next month, has been running the company’s parks and cruises division—an operation with $36 billion in annual revenue and roughly 185,000 employees worldwide. That’s larger than most standalone public companies, even if it doesn’t come with the “CEO” title on LinkedIn.
Why boards are rolling the dice on younger leaders
Boards aren’t suddenly reckless. They’re responding to a changed risk‑reward equation. The skill set required to steer AI transformation, cyber risk, activist campaigns, and global supply chain rewiring doesn’t always live in the classic 62‑year‑old, ex‑CFO archetype.
Several forces are pushing in the same direction:
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Digital and AI fluency – Companies need leaders who instinctively understand data, automation, and platform economics—something more common among executives who grew up professionally in the 1990s and 2000s.
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Cultural credibility – Internal promotions of younger executives are often framed as bets on culture, continuity, and retention, especially as employee expectations around purpose, remote work, and social issues have shifted.
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Succession bottlenecks – Some Gen X executives were “too young” to be chosen during the pandemic, when boards opted for steadiness; now, a portion of that cohort is leapfrogged as companies look for even fresher perspectives.
The risk, of course, is a leadership vacuum: fewer executives with full P&L and crisis‑management experience sitting in the bullpen may push boards to promote even earlier, amplifying the inexperience trend.
Gender setback: fewer new women at the top
Amid all this churn, one trend is quietly moving the wrong way. New female CEO appointments have become scarcer.
Only about 9 % of last year’s incoming CEOs at major U.S. companies were women, down from roughly 15 % the year before. Across the S&P 1500, women now hold around 9 % of CEO roles overall, and just 46–47 women lead S&P 500 companies—even as that figure has finally crept toward 10 %.
Zoom out to the broader Fortune 500 and you see slow progress: women run about 11 % of those companies, up from just over 10 % a year earlier. Yet the fact that the flow of new female CEOs has dipped while total turnover spikes suggests boards are defaulting back to familiar patterns when choices are made under time pressure.
If you’re a board chair, that should be unsettling. High turnover plus lower female appointment rates practically guarantees diversity gains will stall—or reverse.
What this means for boards, investors, and policymakers
For boards, this is a stress test of succession planning. The combination of record turnover, younger incoming chiefs, and shorter tenures means succession can’t be treated as a once‑a‑decade slide deck. It’s continuous risk management.
For investors—especially long‑only institutions, pensions, and family offices—the new CEO cohort introduces fresh governance questions:
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How do you underwrite a first‑time CEO with no prior board experience, especially in a heavily regulated sector?
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Are incentive plans calibrated for shorter tenures, or still built around 10‑year dreams that few leaders actually complete?
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What’s the plan if the “bet on youth” backfires in the first 24–36 months? Extremely short CEO tenures have jumped nearly 80 % year on year, making the revolving door a very real scenario.
Policymakers and regulators, meanwhile, will view this through stability and accountability lenses. A younger, less seasoned C‑suite class steering trillion‑dollar market caps as AI, cyber, and geopolitical risks intensify is not a purely academic concern.
For CEOs, directors, and major shareholders, the message is blunt: the job is turning over faster, starting younger, and carrying more systemic risk. The question isn’t whether this new class of leaders will change corporate America. It’s whether they’ll have enough time—and enough runway—to prove that the bet on youth and first‑timers was worth it.
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