Who is Nike’s new CEO? Elliott Hill—many older workers’ favorite career choice

CEO John Donahoe is leaving Nike after a tumultuous four years at the company. He was replaced by Elliott Hill, who will step in as president and CEO on October 14.

Hill is an unknown name in society, and it is difficult to find a picture of him on the Internet. (Since Donahoe’s firing, Hill hasn’t even appeared on the popular Getty Images website.) But to other Nike employees, he’s not only unknown; you are respected. In interviews with three former Nike employees, each with more than a decade of experience at the company, Hill’s praise was unanimous.

Respected as a competent and courteous person, with an unparalleled understanding of global markets, he is known as the guy who should have gotten the job when Donahoe was hired in 2020.

“Elliot is highly respected,” said a former high-ranking employee. “Whenever anyone asks, who can replace Donahoe? His own [still] always the first name.”

With the announcement of Hill’s appointment, I hear Nike employees are “excited”. Many took off work early on Thursday to celebrate and cut back.

Origins of Elliott Hill

A graduate of Texas Christian University and former athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys, Hill came to Nike out of the NFL as an intern in 1988. Over the next thirty years, he rose to become president of consumer and marketplace, there. oversees Nike’s $39 billion budget. Around 2020, sources tell me that Hill seemed to be the obvious choice to succeed Mark Parker as CEO of the company.

But when Donahoe was appointed—the first chief financial officer from eBay after the Bain experience, some saw not only contempt for Hill but also an insult to Nike’s culture of internal promotion and reliance on senior experience. crew members to steer the ship through difficult times. Insiders saw this oversight, as well as the selection of outsider Donahoe, as less of a co-worker, and the main reason they had to leave Nike. After Donahoe’s appointment, the company let go of 700 people in a restructuring, and many of the C-suite members who weren’t let go on their own—including Hill.

“[Hill] it was a good man. He was seasoned in every way. It was a big depression,” said a former employee who spent 20 years and more at Nike. “His C-suite teams leaving in July 2020 made it right for all of us to leave.”

As I reported in our summer cover story, Donahoe reorganized nearly every aspect of Nike’s marketing and innovation strategy, downgraded its retail partners, and organized product innovation under gender buckets rather than sport. Donahoe’s most successful move was to release new colorways of retro silhouettes, which came at the expense of the company’s name on sneaker heads.

Nike has also lost the core athlete consumer: that is, the running market that launched the brand in the first place. Brooks ranked us as the best-selling running shoe brand in 2022. That commercial failure—combined with several waves of layoffs—saw Donahoe’s tenure decimate Nike’s deep bench of experienced employees. That era ended with the failed Hail Mary comeback for the 2024 Olympics—which Nike reportedly spent an unprecedented amount of marketing on, according to Bloomberg..

“Elliott Hill is one of the most outstanding C-suite executives I have ever worked with,” said Scott Touidjine-Williams, the former global creative director of the Nike Olympics who left in 2022, in an email. Touidjine-Williams says Hill was an experienced leader who listened to a team that respected him, in a way that encouraged both DEI and innovation (albeit with a focus on sales). “When it came to the Olympic work I was doing, he always wanted to know and discussed what was going to happen. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t speak well of Elliott.”

Bringing Hill back to Texas

Hill’s compensation package includes a salary of $1.5 million per year, with a target annual bonus of 200% of that, as well as stock and a cash pension of up to $7 million.

Sources tell me that Hill, after moving from Portland back to his hometown of Austin, Texas, appeared to be interested in returning to Oregon or Nike. A charter member of the Austin Moontowers—an adult recreational baseball team, he was living “on a big sabbatical,” according to a source. But both current and former Nike employees, who still meet and gossip regularly about the company, have been tossing around his name as a replacement for Donahoe—as unlikely as that might seem at this point.

As recently as three weeks ago, another source learned that Hill “butt-called” his former colleague, and when the two spoke, Hill denied that he had any interest in going back.

“I would say, that put a nail in those rumors now,” they laughed.

Hill’s challenge now is that he’s taking over Nike just months after its worst trading day in history, without much of a support structure to help turn things around when he leaves in 2020.

“It’s going to be a brutal, uphill battle for a few years,” the source said. “And knowing that Elliott comes from an old-school world (he was 30!) and doesn’t have some of those people he’s relied on, his gears are gone.”