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US CEO departures are at their highest levels in decades

Last Friday, Walmart announced that its longtime CEO Doug McMillon will step down next January, ending nearly 12 years at the helm — a period during which Walmart’s share price has risen more than 300%.

Calling it quits

McMillon is hardly alone in calling time on his big job. Fellow retailers have seen turnovers, too, including Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan (who lasted just five months) and Target's veteran Brian Cornell, who also plans to step down next January. Big Tech has also seen changes at the top: X’s Linda Yaccarino exited in July, and Spotify's Daniel Ek said in September he’ll shift into the company's executive chairman role after 20 years as CEO.

Indeed, America's C-suite is turning over at its fastest pace in decades. CEO exits hit a record high in 2024, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which has tracked departures since 2002 — and 2025 is looking to be almost as intense. So far this year, 1,650 CEOs have departed through September, essentially matching the 1,652 logged over the same period in 2024.

So, what's driving it? One explanation is that more CEOs are simply hitting retirement age. Half of active S&P 1500 CEOs were over 60 for the first time last year, according to executive search firm Spencer Stuart. 

But the exec-odus isn’t just about aging out; some sectors are churn far faster than others. Indeed, tech CEO exits are running 10× the overall rate, per estimates from RRA, as investors raise the bar for tech leaders in the age of AI. Growing activist pressure is another major driver, which forced out a record 27 CEOs last year, well above the four-year average of 16, and often swooping in after just six quarters of lagging returns.

McMillon’s exit, though, perhaps reflects a less dramatic trend: planned successions, which made up 22% of CEO exits in 2024 — the highest share ever, per RRA — as companies opt for experienced insiders in nearly three-quarters (73%) of cases. 

And, with many CEOs often compensated primarily in equity, the runaway stock market of the last 24 months will have helped those retirement plans no end.

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Although the right to marriage is something America’s political system actually agrees on, new research suggests that young people aren’t so wedded to the idea of tying the knot themselves.

Maybe they’re already fretting about the cost, or maybe they’re more concerned about bad grades than bridal parties, but new analysis from Pew Research Center, using survey data from the University of Michigan, found that high schoolers in the US today are far less likely to express interest in marriage than previous generations.

Indeed, just 67% of 12th graders in 2023 said they were likely to get married one day, compared with the 80% reported three decades before, while the share who said they were most likely to not get married at all nearly doubled to 9% over that period.

This tracks with a long-observed decline in US marriage rates, per Census Bureau data cited by USAFacts. At the most recent count in 2024, the share of married households was only 47.1% — slightly above the all-time low of 46.8% recorded in 2022.

Without a hitch

At the same time, the US is also seeing fewer separations: the number of divorces per 1,000 married women plummeted to 14.4 in 2023, down from its 1980 peak (22.6). So, if messy marriage break-ups aren’t as probable, how come young people today are less drawn to going down the aisle?

The same Pew survey found that, while the share of boys expressing a desire to marry has remained “virtually unchanged,” girls in 2023 were far less likely to say they thought they’d get married one day than those in 1993 (61% vs. 83%) — which, much like falling birth rates, could be the result of a whole host of personal, political, or pay-related reasons.

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The cruise industry is booming thanks to younger consumers looking to “seacation”

The cruise industry’s old adage that “the newly wed, the overfed, and the nearly dead” fuel the business could do with a little update in 2025.

As Sherwood News noted earlier this year, a growing number of Gen Zers and Millennials captivated by the idea of “seacationing” are powering cruise lines through the gloom seen for the broader travel industry this year, as passenger volumes are forecast to hit to ~38 million, up 27% from the prepandemic level in 2019.

When cruise travel reached a record high last year, 36% of global cruise travelers were under the age of 40, per research from the Cruise Lines International Association.

Furthermore, 76% of Gen Zers and a whopping 83% of millennials who have gone on a trip in the last two years say they would plan to cruise again, as North America’s largest cruise operators work hard to appeal to younger travelers, betting on shorter three- to four-day trips, private island destinations, and curated experiences at every turn. 

The new cruise-going demographic is happily adding to these businesses’ top lines — some 30% of Royal Caribbean’s 2.3 million guests in Q2 were millennial-age or younger, per the company’s earnings call, and its research shows that more than half of those passengers are “now more likely to consider cruising.”

By focusing on younger guests and providing them with experiences that keep them coming back, companies are now actively working to “cultivate the next generation of cruisers,” in the words of Royal Caribbean CFO Naftali Holtz, to prop up a business that relies on customer loyalty.

Often highly sensitive to consumer spending, the cruise industry has had a decent year in all, with the three largest North American cruise operators — Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian — all raising their full-year earnings guidance throughout 2025, sustained even amid price increases. 

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