A game of musical chairs took place at three major American companies on February 3rd. It began with Disney , which finally announced the successor to CEO Bob Iger. Josh D'Amaro was unanimously chosen by the group's board of directors to assume the position.

On the same day, PayPal announced Enrique Lores as its new CEO, replacing Alex Chriss, who had only been in the position for two years. As a result of this change, Bruce Broussard was appointed interim president of HP Inc., which had previously been led by Lores.

Far from being an atypical day for the top executives of large listed companies in the United States , the date only reinforced the fact that turnover in leadership positions is an increasingly common practice for these companies.

A survey conducted by the American consulting firm Spencer Stuart, highlighted by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) , emphasizes that there hasn't been such a large crop of new CEOs leading publicly traded companies in the United States for at least 15 years.

According to the report, about one in nine CEOs will be replaced at 1,500 of the country's largest listed companies by 2025. This is the highest rate since at least 2010, when the United States was recovering from the 2008 crisis.

At the same time, there is no indication that this pace will slow down in 2026. In addition to the examples mentioned, companies such as Walmart , Procter & Gamble, and Lululemon also resorted to this tactic at the beginning of this year.

In another example of this race, retailer Target announced Michael Fiddelke as its new CEO on February 5th. He replaced veteran Brian Cornell, who had led the company for over eleven years.

The consultancy notes that this movement is taking place in a context where companies need to deal with the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence, profound changes in established business practices, and a highly unstable scenario from an economic and geopolitical standpoint.

“We are in a new environment and someone who is going to repeat past strategies is not necessarily right,” James Citrin, global head of CEOs at Spencer Stuart and author of the report, told the WSJ .

He added that "if the CEO fails to generate momentum both internally, with good operational performance, and with investors, the boards of directors become even more impatient than before."

Other figures that illustrate this scenario show that companies with a combined market value of $1.3 trillion either appointed or lost their CEOs in the last quarter of 2025 alone. This list includes names like Verizon and Yum Brands, which owns the fast-food chains KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell.

Companies that changed or lost their CEOs at the beginning of 2026 have a combined market value of US$2.2 trillion. Walmart, led since the beginning of the month by John Furner, represents almost half of that amount.

Some of these changes had already been underway for some time. This is the case at Berkshire Hathaway, where Greg Abel took over from Warren Buffett on January 1st, as part of a succession plan proposed by the "Oracle of Omaha" in 2021.

Other moves, however, caught the market by surprise, such as Lores' departure from HP Inc. to PayPal. And also the decision by the biotechnology company Codexis to suddenly replace CEO Stephen Dilly, who had been in the position for three years, with CTO Alison Moore, in addition to reducing its workforce by 24%.

The survey also shows that these changes have been marked by the departure of veterans from leadership positions in these companies – cases such as Doug McMillon of Walmart, after more than ten years, and Buffett himself, who led Berkshire Hathaway for six decades.

At the same time, Spencer Stuart identified that the new CEOs are younger and less experienced than previous generations. The average age of this new crop is 54 years, compared to almost 56 years in the list of nominees in 2024.

In other figures, more than 80% of the 168 CEOs who took office last year were newcomers to the position, with no prior experience managing listed companies or large independent corporations. Two-thirds of them had never served on a board of directors.

Some of them, like Paul Shoukry of Raymond James, are younger than their predecessors were when they took on that role. The 42-year-old executive was promoted from CFO to CEO in February 2025, replacing Paul Reilly, who was 55 when he was appointed to the position in 2010.

The study shows, however, that the number of female CEOs declined in 2025. Only 9% of appointments involved female executives, compared to 15% in 2025. Overall, about 9% of CEOs of S&P 500 companies are women.