DUCK DYNASTY Dan Amos in front of a mural at Aflac’s headquarters— where the company mascot is everywhere you look.
THIRTY-FOUR YEARS running the same company: It’s not that long, cosmically speaking, and yet today’s world is in some ways unrecognizably different from 1990. The American president then was George Bush (the first one). The Soviet Union was still standing, while China was just emerging as a global superpower. The internet had barely started crawling into U.S. homes, and smartphones were decades away from upending how we all live. It was a world before Facebook, Google, Amazon, or ChatGPT.
1990 was when Aflac chairman and CEO Dan Amos started running the oddball life insurer founded by his father and two uncles. When Amos took over, his family’s company was not yet “AFLAAAAC!” The TV-commercial squawking of Aflac’s duck mascot, which Amos unleashed in 2000, would go on to create a pop-culture phenomenon—one that helped change how all insurance is sold.
Over those 34 years, Amos grew his family’s company into a Fortune 500 fixture, with $18.7 billion in revenue last year. Its annual sales have increased sevenfold over his tenure. Its shares were trading at around $85 in late March, far beyond their (split-adjusted) 1990 value of $1.
“I’ve experienced it all,” Amos told me recently, sitting in Aflac’s blocky tower in Columbus, Ga., which his predecessors built in 1975. At age 72, he is now the fifth-longest-serving CEO of any Fortune 500 company. (Berkshire Hathaway’s 93-year-old Warren Buffett holds the longest tenure.)
It’s a tremendous and rare accomplishment, especially given that the average Fortune 500 CEO lasts seven years. At several years past the traditional (and, at some companies, mandated) U.S. retirement age of 65, Amos has outlasted many of his contemporaries and seen multiple would-be successors, including his son, retire or resign. And by now he’s used to global upheaval: “He’s been able to navigate a pandemic, a changing rate environment, and a changing product portfolio admirably well,” says John Barnidge, a Piper Sandler analyst who covers Aflac and other insurers.
But despite the vampire fantasies of biohacking Silicon Valley billionaires, no CEO lives—or works—forever. Amos is closer to the end of his tenure than its beginning—even if, like Buffett, he clearly relishes what he does and plans to keep on doing it as long as he physically can. “There’s only so many fish I can catch,” Amos says. “I’m not going to be that good of a retiree.”
