U.S. online payments company PayPal reportedly said yesterday, that CEO Dan Schulma will retire and leave the company at the end of 2023.
Dan Schulma became PayPal’s CEO in 2015 after the company split from eBay.
He informed the company of his decision to retire at the end of December, but he will remain a member of PayPal’s board of directors. In response, PayPal said it is hiring an executive search firm to find a successor.
“I am proud of what we have accomplished at PayPal and of the talented and dedicated people I work with every day,” Shulman said in a statement, “Together we have reimagined financial services and e-commerce and worked to improve the financial health for our customers.”
PayPal’s stock price has risen about 130 percent since its separation from eBay in 2015. But the company’s market capitalization has evaporated by about three-quarters since the stock’s peak in July 2021.
In late January, PayPal said it would cut 2,000 jobs, or 7 percent of the company’s workforce. Dan Schulman said in a statement at the time that PayPal was dealing with a “challenging macroeconomic environment.
Last summer, activist investor Elliott Management amassed an undisclosed stake in PayPal. At the time, Shulman said he did not feel any pressure from Elliott. “We really haven’t talked much in the past quarter,” Dan Schulman said.
“Jesse and I are good friends,” he said, referring to Jesse Cohn, managing partner of Elliott Management. “I’m sure the news will come as a surprise and a shock, because he’s always been so supportive.”
Dan Schulman added that PayPal’s “board is just trying to find the best person for the job,” and said it would “look throughout the company and outside. He said PayPal is “in good shape” and “well positioned for a year of strong growth,” adding that the board has plenty of time to find a successor.
DanSchulman said, “The timing is right. It was able to make sense.”
PayPal’s announcement of Dan Shulman’s impending departure coincided with the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report. The company said fourth-quarter net income rose 7 percent year over year to $7.4 billion. The company’s stock fell to $77.99 in after-hours trading.
