You might be clinging to your job these days — but plenty of CEOs aren’t.
Bosses across corporate America are leaving at record rates, even as everyday workers hang on tight in a cooling job market, spooked by AI and stricter management styles making a comeback.
That divide has created a weird corporate split screen: CEOs can walk away and usually land comfortably, while workers feel stuck, says Richard Smith, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School.
Unlike most employees who rely on steady paychecks and worry about layoffs, former CEOs often have big financial cushions. Taking a year or two off doesn’t really faze them.
“As the old saying goes, it’s good to be at the top,” Smith told Business Insider.
Leaders are feeling better than workers
Whether it’s job security fears or the burnout hangover from the Great Resignation, workers’ engagement and well-being are slipping.
Smith runs the Human Capital Development Lab at Johns Hopkins, and in new data from 2024 — covering over 1.3 million workers — he found that managers and senior leaders now report higher well-being than the average employee. That’s a flip from the early pandemic years, when managers were more stressed running remote teams and handling chaos.
‘I can’t make a move right now’
A lot of workers are dealing with quality-of-life frustrations: return-to-office rules, anxiety about AI, or feeling like demand for their skills is cooling. Many, Smith says, have the sense of, “I can’t make a move right now.”
CEOs, on the other hand, seem way less boxed in.
By the end of September, 1,650 U.S. CEOs had left their roles, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas — pacing right alongside 2024, which already set a record since tracking began in 2002.
Some big names have stepped aside recently: Linda Yaccarino left X in July, Spotify’s Daniel Ek is shifting into an executive-chairman role, and Walmart’s Doug McMillon just announced he’ll retire in January after about a decade in the job.
CEO tenures are shrinking, too. Leaders who left in Q3 had been in their role an average of 7.2 years, down from around 8.4 years just a couple years ago, per Russell Reynolds Associates.
Why they’re bouncing
Of course, not every CEO walks out voluntarily. Boards don’t hesitate to push out underperformers — shareholders demand results, said Harvard law professor Jesse Fried.
Shareholder activism has been running hot, hitting record levels globally in Q3 2025.
Fried says the job has just gotten tougher: “The environment has become much more dynamic, which makes their job harder.”
Meanwhile, CEO pay keeps climbing — something Warren Buffett slammed this week in a letter to shareholders. Median CEO pay jumped from 176.7 times the median worker’s pay in 2020 to 194.5 times in 2024, according to Equilar.
But those giant pay packages also mean CEOs have plenty of runway if they’re fired — or simply bored.
As Fried put it: “If they never want to work again, they can do that.”