Maybe we have been too hard on Dan. He has been walking a tightrope since he entered the role. Verizon is struggling as a company, and you can’t expect leadership to be fully transparent because that could create panic and trigger a stock selloff. That’s bad for everyone, especially when you are carrying around $175 billion in debt and backed heavily by institutional investors.
A lot of those institutional investors are tied to retirement accounts, pensions, city employees, and everyday people. A company like Verizon stumbling would not just affect telecom, it could shake confidence across the market. Imagine a major telecom provider, something most people view as a basic utility at this point, struggling to sustain itself. Rational people would immediately start asking what other companies are being held together by perception instead of fundamentals.
I genuinely feel for the employees and managers carrying the pressure right now, but some of what we are seeing may be the result of years of bad positioning, losing market share, and delayed course correction. None of this happens overnight.