Sarah Nassauer

There's a reason that Walmart and other retailers reported such strong sales when we were getting stimulus checks during the pandemic.

You know, that all flowed right to Walmart and others' bottom line.

In the constellation of CEOs speaking out, I would place him at medium to high medium in terms of speaking out.

You saw McMillan join in to speak out to support gay rights.

The company made changes about how it sold guns after mass shootings.

But you saw him speak out, you know, when there were other moments of national stress over like race relations or discrimination.

Certainly after George Floyd was murdered, you know, he was one of the CEOs speaking out.

He, like others, has not spoken out about anything during Trump's second term.

There's been some light commentary from the company about tariffs and prices will need to go higher for consumers and they don't want that, that kind of thing.

But he and the company have quieted down quite a bit on those types of topics.

Why are you leaving now?

It's a really good question.

I mean, you know, he's been CEO for 12 years.

It was going to happen at some point.

I believe that he could have stayed on longer if that's what he really felt strongly about.

I think that they also, you know, the executives and the board decided that John Ferner was the heir apparent and coalesced around that and then had to decide, you know, how long will he wait for to be given that role?

And this is clearly when they thought they should make that transition.

Yeah, so I think they have said they aren't going to create an LLM.

They're not going to create ChatGPT.

They're not going to create a system that lets people interact with AI in that way.