Myth of the omnipotent CEO undone this earnings season

Guidance pulled due to uncertainty & the $30M shrug

There’s a curious earnings season ritual that plays out during turbulent economic times. A CEO who earns more in a year than most small nations generate in GDP steps up to the mic and delivers the strategic equivalent of a shoulder shrug: “Due to policy uncertainty, we are not providing earnings guidance at this time.”

The market nods. The analysts update their models with a blank cell. Everyone moves on.

Except they shouldn’t.

For all the talk of leadership and resilience, many of today’s highly paid executives fold like a cheap lawn chair when faced with ambiguity.

Geopolitical risks, shifting tariffs, pending elections, “unclear” macro outlooks—these have become the all-purpose excuse for opacity. The message: We can’t possibly forecast anything in this environment. But if a CEO paid $30M annually can’t even offer a rough range of outcomes, we should be asking whether the board is rewarding stewardship—or simply subsidizing caution.

As Jeremy Irons' character, John Tuld, CEO of the fictional investment bank that triggers the global financial crisis in the movie Margin Call says:

Do you care to know why I'm in this chair, with you all? Why I earn the big bucks? I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more.

There’s always uncertainty

Let’s be clear: macro risk is real. We haven't seen today's political and economic environment in perhaps 100 years. But risk is always present. 1987. 1997. 2000. 2001. 2008. 2011. 2020. CEOs have guided through oil shocks, wars, pandemics, and monetary tightening.

A CEOs job isn’t to predict the future—it’s to frame plausible scenarios and articulate a plan. Otherwise, what are we paying for?

Let's look at one recent example. It's one of many.

On April 9, Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian pulled the company's 2025 financial guidance altogether, citing global trade uncertainty and softening revenue confidence. In other words: too foggy to forecast.

A few days later, United Airlines steps up and takes a different path. One where leadership models uncertainty without pretending to know the unknowable.

In its Q1 2025 earnings update, United provided two distinct scenarios for full-year earnings:

No hand-waving. No vague comments about "monitoring demand trends." Just a clean, transparent forecast—anchored in reality. As Mohamed El-Erian put it, United’s move was a reminder to "think in terms of multiple scenarios for internal planning and not just stick to the usual."

The kicker? United’s stock popped 5% after the announcement. Not because the outlook was wildly bullish, but because the market appreciates clarity—even in a downturn.

It’s a stark contrast. Two major carriers. Same macro backdrop. One offers a scenario matrix; the other chooses radio silence.

Why the difference?

Note: In absolute fairness to Mr Bastian, he said on the earnings call that Delta is "acting as if we're going into a recession." By pulling its forecast, the company's goal is to keep investor expectations in check. I'll get to that next.

What this says about incentive design

Boards need to rethink what they’re compensating for. If the game is EPS or share price alone, CEOs will manage optics, not operations. But if you start tying comp to strategic transparency, capital allocation quality, or operational resilience, maybe we’ll see fewer earnings calls where the most valuable piece of information is what wasn’t said.

What we’re witnessing is incentive misalignment. CEOs are often paid based on share price, not strategy. Guidance invites accountability; no guidance offers plausible deniability. When you don’t guide, you can’t miss.

Closing thought

You don’t pay Tom Brady $50M to sit out because the defense is confusing. You pay him because the defense will be confusing—and you trust him to win anyway.

We should expect the same from corporate leadership. And if a CEO claims they can’t offer guidance because the future is uncertain, maybe the question isn’t why they pulled guidance—it’s why they’re still in the job.

Counterpoint #1: Silence isn’t always weakness

There are cases where withholding guidance is the right call. If your business is negotiating sensitive regulatory changes, or if visibility is impaired by factors that even scenario modeling can’t account for (e.g., imminent geopolitical shocks, cascading credit events), silence can be the most honest form of communication.

But let’s not kid ourselves: most of the time, that’s not the case.

Counterpoint #2: This time is very, very different

There’s a real possibility that this isn’t just the usual macro fog—it’s a full-blown instrument failure.

When Delta pulled its 2025 guidance, it wasn’t an act of obfuscation. It was an admission that the altitude gauge may be lying, the radar is flickering, and the flight path ahead is less "uncertain" and more unknowable.

In a post-quantitative-easing world reeling from rapid monetary tightening, destabilized trade norms, and weaponized regulation, the forecasting models that once provided visibility are now generating less signal and more noise.

To quote Jerome Powell just days ago at The Economic Club of Chicago:

"There isn’t a modern experience for how to think about this."

That line should chill anyone still clinging to historical baselines.

If someone like Ed Bastian, backed by one of the most sophisticated forecasting teams in corporate America, can’t offer guidance, it’s not necessarily a lack of competence or courage—it may be a sign that the system is breaking in ways we don’t fully grasp. The old models aren’t holding.

And if that’s true, we’re not just talking about a quarter or two of visibility issues. We’re talking about a fundamental pause in how large enterprises make capital allocation decisions—delaying investment, hiring, procurement, and planning. If America’s most experienced CEOs are flying blind, then the real risk isn’t poor performance—it’s paralysis.

That should scare us more than a missed quarter. Because a business that can’t see the mountain ahead won’t just miss—it might hit it.