History and Business Lovers,
Last week we announced that I would be giving a single session zoom class on the history of business in America, which will focus on how business, the economy, and technologies intertwine. I will cover the rise of industry, early American ingenuity, and how fast new technologies have been adopted. Participants will learn about the great trusts of the 1890s, the merger wave of the 1920s, the conglomerate madness of the 1960s, and much more. We cannot see the future without understanding the past.
In order to reach more people and share our enthusiasm for learning these important lessons, we have made this class free to our readers, but you do need to respond to this email or email me at gary@americanbusinesshistory.org to sign up.
The zoom class will take place at 7 PM Central Time on Tuesday, October 6 and last two hours.
We hope you join us! Or encourage a student to sign up.
And we always welcome your financial support for our work, just click here to donate.
Gary Hoover
In our longstanding study of American business and how it has evolved and will evolve in the future, we sometimes note factors that few others seem to pay attention to. For example, few scholars and observers write or talk about the average lifespan of companies, how long the average corporation survives, or how longevity varies by industry. We hope to embark on that challenging research task in the future.
Along the same lines, how long is the average CEO tenure? Do we learn anything when we see a company where the top job is a revolving door, or a company where the leaders are given long tenures to carry out their programs? Today we present an early effort to take a look, and the results are most interesting.
We took the list of the 100 largest American companies, based on this year’s Fortune 500 list, which we turned into an animated chart in an earlier post. We then looked at all the CEOs that each company has had since 1950 and how long each was in office. This required some adjustments for missing data. To obtain valid CEO tenure averages for each company, we excluded the current CEO since we don’t yet know how long they will last. For some parts of the study, we excluded founders as they tend to stick around longer than the average CEO and are not initially picked by a board of directors in the standard way. What did we discover?
How long does the average CEO have the Job?
Looking back at all the CEOs these 100 companies have had over the last 76 years, excluding the current CEO, the average tenure was 8.5 years. If we exclude the founders, the average is 7.5 years. Current CEOs average about 5 years of service, part way through their reigns.
We took a quick look back at the situation 40 years ago to see if the 8 average has changed over the years. It appears that it has not changed, despite the ever-quickening speed of technological change and the never-ending investor pressures to produce results each quarter. (Most long-serving CEOs have seen at least a few bumps in the road but survived them.)
Which CEOs today are the most experienced?
As to which current CEOs have served the longest, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies tops the list at 39 years, combining his two stints that were briefly separated by another fellow. Next on the list are Jensen Huang of NVidia at 33 years, Richard Fairbank of Capital One at 32 years, Brian Roberts of Comcast at 24 years, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms at 22 years. All are founders except for Roberts at Comcast, who is the son of the founder.
Among more traditional “hired hands,” Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Hock Tan of Broadcom lead the list at 20 years each, followed by Thomas Wilson at Allstate at 19 years and Elon Musk of Tesla at 18 years. It is pretty amazing that so many of the most experienced, veteran corporate leaders are also founders of relatively young companies.
Among all the past CEO tenures in our study, the longest were Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway at 55 years until his recent retirement (we treated him as founder though the Berkshire story is more complex) and the late Fred Smith of FedEx at 51 years.
Which companies keep their CEOs the longest (and shortest)?
The company with the longest average tenure, excluding the founder, is insurance giant Progressive, where the average CEO served 25.5 years. Next were StoneX Group at 22, State Farm Insurance at 14.8, Microsoft at 14, American Express at 13.6, Centene at 13.5, Lowe’s at 13.3, and Archer Daniels Midland at 13.
At the extreme other end of the list, the most “revolving door” companies have been Freddie Mac at just 3.1 years, Citigroup at 4.2, Charter Communications at 4.2, Enterprise Products Partners at 4.3, HCA Healthcare at 4.8, and General Motors at 4.8. Note that both Charter and GM went bankrupt in 2009, but that today GM has one of the longer serving CEOs, Mary Barra at 12 years.
Does stability pay off for investors?
And the million-dollar question: do these comparisons mean anything? Do the companies which keep their CEOs around longer do better or worse?
We took out the mutual insurance companies, focused on public companies, and looked at their stock performance over the last 20 years alongside the average tenure data. We also excluded companies still led by the founder in order to focus on companies with long and diverse CEO histories.
Our comparison is between the 15 companies with the longest average tenures and the 15 companies with the shortest, giving us a broad array of industries, and about one-third of all the companies in the study. Some companies like Lowe’s were excluded due to complex CEO histories – in the mid-1970s when your writer was a retail stock analyst, they were led by five co-CEOs! The gap between the two groups is surprisingly large:
Here is the value of $10,000 invested in 2006, spread equally among the component firms, as of the end of 2025:
Nasdaq 100 Average $170,000
15 Companies with Low CEO Turnover $117,700
S&P 500 Average $80,600
Dow Jones Average $69,500
15 Companies with High CEO Turnover $43,300
Note that the bottom 15 includes the two bankruptcies, Charter and General Motors, during this period, so those investments were wiped out. But even if the investor had had the foresight to exclude those two and only invest in the other 13, the result would have been $49,900, not a big improvement.
The same groups in terms of Compound Annual Rates of Return (including the value of stocks received in spinoffs and reinvestment of dividends) looked like this:
Here are the details on those 30 companies:
The 15 with low CEO turnover:
The 15 with high CEO turnover:
(Note that 0 tenure means that the CEO is new in 2026, having not yet finished a year.)
We hesitate to draw any firm conclusions or make any predictions from these numbers, given that each company has its own story and evolution, and that a huge number of variables affect corporate success and failure. Some companies with stable histories may not continue that way while others with more turbulent management stories may have settled down. Nevertheless, these comparisons are striking.
As always, there are thousands of ways to massage and sort data like this. The preceding paragraphs represent a quick, initial look at the role of CEO turnover. We hope more observers adopt our long-term view and do similar research in order to truly understand the “big picture” of American business. That is required if we are truly to understand how the world of business and management works.
If you like our work, please consider a donation! Every dollar helps us focus on our research and education efforts.
Gary Hoover
Executive Director
American Business History Center
