John Stankey’s long way back to the connection

John Stankey once helped sell the idea that a telephone company belonged in Hollywood. He ran the entertainment business, took charge of WarnerMedia and then became chief executive of AT&T. From that chair, he helped send WarnerMedia out of the company again. It is an unusually public way to revise a business proposition. Most people get to change their minds without distributing shares.

That turn gives his career its tension. Stankey is an insider with a brief to change the institution that trained him. He joined Pacific Bell in 1985, long before streaming subscriptions became a household expense. Four decades later, his argument for AT&T rests on fiber and wireless: the connections through which other people’s ambitions travel.

There is something revealing about an executive who has occupied both sides of that proposition. Owning the entertainment promises a place in the audience’s imagination. Carrying it requires a connection that works when the audience presses play. Stankey has had responsibility for both, and the later chapter of his career is an expensive commitment to the second.

A sporting-goods education

Before the conference stages and quarterly calls, there were tennis rackets. As a high-school student, Stankey worked in a sporting-goods store, stringing them. The California childhood also included earning Eagle Scout. Those are modest details beside a corporate biography, but they bring the scale down to something recognizable: a young person learning how a shop works before learning how to run a division.

He was the youngest of three children, with an insurance-underwriter father and a mother who stayed home. He grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 1985 with a finance degree. Pacific Bell followed that year. His MBA from UCLA arrived in 1991. The route was through established institutions, with the phone business providing an expanding set of problems.

His later job titles cover a surprising amount of corporate territory: technology, operations, business customers, strategy and entertainment. That breadth matters in a company where a decision about a network eventually becomes a decision about money, people and customers. The résumé suggests repeated exposure to those collisions. It also complicates any tidy portrait of a career spent doing one thing.

The Hollywood chapter stays in the story

AT&T put Stankey in charge of its Entertainment Group after the 2015 purchase of DIRECTV. The following year brought DIRECTV Now, a streaming service. After the Time Warner acquisition closed in 2018, he led WarnerMedia. He had moved from the business of connections into a business whose products could make people argue about an ending for weeks.

He also had experienced company. Peter Chernin, the former News Corp. executive, was a sounding board during the media expansion; AT&T and Chernin had established Otter Media in 2014. The relationship is a useful reminder that the transition involved an existing circle of industry connections. Stankey’s background was telecom, but his responsibilities had already taken him beyond it.

By October 2019, he was AT&T’s president and chief operating officer, overseeing AT&T Communications, WarnerMedia and Xandr. He became CEO on July 1, 2020, succeeding Randall Stephenson. The new title widened the question. Instead of asking how to make the media business work, he now had to decide how it belonged inside the whole company.

In a 2021 conversation with David Rubenstein, Stankey described reviewing the company’s direction from the start of his tenure. He spoke about investors, customers, employees and different possible transactions. His phrase for the task was “an optimization equation.” That is a very telecom way to describe a Hollywood separation: several competing demands, a finite supply of capital and no answer that pleases everyone.

The separation closed on April 8, 2022, combining WarnerMedia with Discovery. AT&T shareholders received an interest in the resulting Warner Bros. Discovery. It was a consequential reversal of the earlier corporate design, and Stankey’s involvement in the expansion belongs beside his involvement in the exit. A fair account of his career has to leave both entries on the page.

AT&T’s remaining DIRECTV investment went later. The company closed the sale of its final 70% stake to TPG in July 2025. By then, the movement away from owning entertainment was visible in completed transactions. The question facing Stankey had become more concentrated: could an AT&T centered on connectivity justify the capital and patience it required?

The arithmetic of a quieter business

The answer is being attempted one location at a time. In the second quarter of 2024, AT&T reported that its fiber network passed 27.8 million consumer and business locations. It added 239,000 fiber customers in that quarter. The distinction matters: a location passed is an opportunity to sell service; a customer has actually chosen to buy it.

By June 2025, the company announced that it passed more than 30 million fiber locations. Its next ambition was roughly twice that reach. Expansion came through several routes, including its own construction, the Gigapower joint venture and agreements to sell service over other providers’ infrastructure. Even a strategy that sounds simple needs more than one way to get down the street.

On February 2, 2026, AT&T completed its $5.75 billion cash acquisition of substantially all of Lumen’s Mass Markets fiber business. The purchase added more than a million fiber subscribers and more than four million locations, extending the company’s fiber presence to 32 states. Denver, Seattle and Salt Lake City were among the new markets. This was expansion in the same business rather than another trip into entertainment.

The larger proposition is to sell wireless and home internet together. In the first quarter of 2026, nearly 45% of AT&T’s advanced home internet subscribers also took its wireless service. For Stankey, that overlap is evidence that customers will buy several connections from one company. For customers, the proposition has to survive a less abstract examination: price, service and whether the connection behaves itself.

On October 21, 2026, AT&T reported third-quarter revenue of $32.3 billion, up 5.3% from a year earlier. Stankey emphasized customers choosing the company for internet and mobile service together. The quarterly figures give the strategy a current scoreboard. They cannot settle the outcome of investments whose usefulness and returns extend well beyond a single reporting period.

A supporting role, delivered dry

There is a smaller, more entertaining view of Stankey in his 2024 conversation with Steve Ballmer about the Clippers’ Intuit Dome. Ballmer supplied the arena-owner enthusiasm; Stankey supplied the infrastructure. Asked about AT&T missing out on naming rights, he replied, “We sometimes know we should play a supporting role.” A useful line for someone whose product is often appreciated most when nobody thinks about it.

He described seven and a half miles of fiber inside the venue. The exchange made the business tangible: the building’s connectivity would have to accommodate changing devices and ideas. Ballmer could imagine what fans might do next. Stankey’s contribution was making room for it. The moment also showed a dry conversational ease that a list of executive appointments would struggle to convey.

“We sometimes know we should play a supporting role.”

John Stankey, in conversation with Steve Ballmer, 2024

His public description of leadership is similarly practical. He compares running AT&T to managing a sports team, putting people into positions where they can succeed while deciding where to spend. He has called part of his job being a “provocateur or disruptor from within.” An insider has an advantage there: familiarity with the machinery. Familiarity can also make the machinery harder to question.

What he chooses to build

His education philanthropy provides another clue to his interests. John and Shari Stankey established a faculty fellowship at Loyola Marymount for interdisciplinary research and creative work. It offers up to $50,000 a year and requires meaningful student involvement. The initial focus brought together journalism, media, computer science and business. Those subjects reproduce some of the boundaries his working life has crossed.

There is a concrete educational choice in that design. A student can study a discipline in isolation; a working business promptly introduces the other disciplines, usually with deadlines. The fellowship makes room for students in the research itself, through roles such as internships and assistantships. It gives the link between academic work and employment an actual mechanism rather than leaving it as a ceremonial wish.

The company's long horizon is larger still. In March 2026, Stankey announced an investment-and-spend commitment exceeding $250 billion over five years for U.S. connectivity. That wording matters: the commitment includes spending as well as investment, and is a future undertaking. It should not be read as a pile of already completed construction. The useful test will be what gets built and how it serves people.

Stankey’s story remains open at that point. The executive who once ran a media company is asking people to judge a network company by its reach, its customer relationships and its ability to keep paying for what comes next. After four decades, his career has acquired a peculiar symmetry: he entered through the phone business, traveled through Hollywood and returned to the connection. The screen has plenty of stars. Someone still has to get the picture there.