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2024 has been a long one. Even outside the year’s seismic political events, the business world has seen it all: big name bankruptcies, botched mergers leading to bankruptcy, you name it.
One other hugely notable event that happened in 2024? Our midyear dispatch on the biggest CFO moves of the year…so far. That included CFO switchups at OpenAI, Costco, Airbnb, and Instacart. (And maybe you already read our first day interviews with those last two…)
The thing about 2024 is that now it’s basically over, and thus, it’s time to finish what we started this summer. So without further ado, here are the rest of the biggest CFO moves this year.
Guac on the side. In July, Chipotle’s longtime CFO, Jack Hartung, announced his retirement in March 2025, then later postponed it. In the meantime, Adam Rymer, a 15-year veteran with the fast casual dining establishment, saw his impending CFO appointment accelerated, stepping into the seat in October instead of the planned January 2025 start date. That changed succession timeline occurred after Chipotle’s former CEO, Brian Niccol, left the company to take over as CEO of Starbucks.
Delivery arriving today. UPS also ushered in an internal CFO hire. Brian Dykes, a 25-year company veteran, stepped into the CFO seat this July. In his multi-decade UPS tenure, Dykes served as everything from SVP of global finance and planning to positions spanning corporate treasury and M&A.
Wake up, makeup. Aaaand let’s add one other internal hire to the list. Akhil Shrivastava took over as CFO of beauty behemoth Estée Lauder at the start of November. He’s been at the company since 2015, most recently as SVP, corporate controller.
Tech savvy. In September, Microsoft announced that Carolina Dybeck Happe, formerly CFO at GE, would be joining the company as EVP and chief operations officer.
Back in the distant land of 2023, we covered Happe’s appearance at the MIT Sloan CFO Summit, when she was still a CFO. There, she talked about the uniqueness of her career journey thus far (which only feels all the more prescient now).
“I probably did something unusual because I was actually in a tech company, and then I moved to an industrial company, but everybody else was going from industrials to a tech company,” she said.
Ah, what a difference a year makes.