A Sudden Changing Of The Guard, At Apple, Adobe, Netflix And Disney

How is it that seemingly half the long-time CEOs in Big Tech got old, or at least retired, all of a sudden?

Tim Cook’s announcement Tuesday that he’s stepping aside as Apple CEO after 15 years, while remaining executive chairman, had been foreshadowed for a while, but somehow was still a bit of a surprise when it happened. In fact, successor John Ternus has been rumored successor-in-waiting for at least the past year, with appropriately prominent roles at big confabs such as the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

The same day as Cook’s announcement, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen strode onto a Las Vegas stage for what likely will be his last company summit after 18 years running the software giant. Amid a so-so earnings call a few weeks back, Narayen said he would step down as CEO as soon as a replacement was found, though he would remain as chairman.

“We’re living at a true inflection point, a moment where creativity and marketing are entering the era of AI,” Narayen said. “We’re getting away from the fear of the blank page.”

As creative workflows are further democratized, the velocity of content creation will accelerate, requiring high quality, faster, and at greater scale than ever, with a need for creative differentiation to stand out, Narayen went on. In fact, it could have been a description of the challenges facing Adobe and many other companies in tech and entertainment, a source of pressure that doubtless contributed to his plan to step aside.

Narayen used his moment before 14,000 attendees at the Adobe Summit to hold a fond conversation with long-time friend Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.

They reminisced about growing up as immigrant kids, about projects their companies developed together, and about how AI would make Adobe’s sophisticated and complex programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro more accessible to everyone. Then, in a sweet, rather symbolic moment, the pair hugged and walked off-stage into the darkness, arms over each other’s shoulders.

Last week, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos used his company’s latest earnings call to say that co-founder Reed Hastings, who was CEO or Co-CEO for most of the company’s existence, wouldn’t be running for another term in June as chairman of the board.

For the first time in nearly three decades, the company won’t have the regular input of the man who built the company from nothing into a $450 billion streaming colossus that turned Hollywood upside down.

And though Disney is not part of Silicon Valley or Big Tech, it is the biggest traditional entertainment company. And it’s just waved a fond farewell to former two-time CEO Bob Iger after nearly two decades in the captain’s chair.

Almost immediately after Iger’s mid-March departure, successor Josh D’Amaro announced 1,000 layoffs would be coming.

Many cuts hit areas that are lagging in this new era, including entire units in home-entertainment marketing, and corners of Marvel at a time when the comic-book king has ceded its crown to arch rival DC, and its formerly can’t-miss movie adaptations have become less reliable box-office performers.

To be sure, Iger presided over 7,000 Mouse House layoffs during his long tenure, often occasioned by shifts in the entertainment business, such as the near-collapse of the formerly lucrative DVD and Blu-Ray sector, and declines in theatrical box office, broadcast and cable audiences amid streaming’s rise.

In fact, it’s difficult not to ascribe at least part of the many departures of prominent CEOs to one thing: artificial intelligence.

The things that made Cook, a logistics wizard, so successful are perhaps slightly less important in the future, even as the company’s iPhones continue to generate a staggering $200 billion in revenue a year. But the company’s subscription-driven Services unit now has an annual run rate of $120 billion, the second-biggest contributor to Apple’s $4 trillion market capitalization.

And Apple is keeping around Cook’s in-the-room Southern charm and social savvy, to help Ternus and Apple navigate the political shoals of increasingly erratic Trump Administration tariffs and trade fights.

Even the company’s big whiff on using AI to improve its Siri digital assistant may not be crippling. The company signed a deal with Alphabet for Google Gemini, in the process avoiding hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditures that other tech companies have been spending.

But AI is dominating the futures of (and investor thinking about) so many companies, especially software-dominated firms such as Adobe. At NAB, I talked with Blackmagic Design founder and CEO Grant Petty, who’s been running his company for a quarter of a century. Though the blunt-spoken Australian said he doesn’t closely follow what his competitors are doing, at Adobe, “they’ve got an AI problem.”

Yes, Adobe used this same Summit three years ago to launch its own AI large language model, Firefly, and has been finding new uses for it ever since. Wrapped around Narayen’s session, Adobe President of Customer Experience Orchestration Business Anil Chakravarthy unveiled a string of AI-driven tools and bundles that reshape its vast suite of marketing software.

Down the street from the summit, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Adobe executives briefed me on Firefly’s Creative Cloud uses, including a browser-based eponymous program that generates and edits video from several big AI companies’ tools.

At Disney, the impact of AI on the economics of TV and film production, and video content in general, surely played a role in the board’s decision to choose D’Amaro, a long-time veteran of the company’s Experiences unit, over Dana Walden, a gifted studio executive.

The theme parks, cruises, resorts and other real-world, very corporeal parts of Experiences indubitably will be a much bigger source of Disney profits in this looming era than even the company’s storied film, animation and TV studios.

And Netflix is decisively moving into the AI era too. Days before that Hastings announcement, the company cinched a deal to buy filmmaker-focused AI production company InterPositive from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, for up to $600 million, Bloomberg reported.

At the earnings call, Sarandos said the company is looking to add other AI capabilities throughout the organization, in areas such as marketing, customer engagement, program recommendations and more. He hinted more deal-making might be part of that as Netflix positions itself for the future of entertainment.

Hastings won’t be hanging around to help steer that, even if his departure, at 65, surprised even Netflix executives. But then again, Sarandos noted, Hastings has never been an ordinary CEO. He’s long had many other interests, including contributing tens of millions of dollars to education and education reform.

But his sudden departure, like those of former peers at these other major tech and entertainment companies, suggests just how much the landscape is about to change as AI becomes part of everything.