The Founder’s Edge: 19 Founder-Led Stocks That Outperformed the S&P 500 Over the Last 10 Years

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Tough markets are hard on everyone. They’re hardest on companies that have lost their founder.

What Happens to a Stock When the Founder Steps Down

A founder’s departure isn’t the only factor influencing a stock price. Sector headwinds, macroeconomic conditions, and company-specific challenges all play a role.

But among companies that were founder led at some point during the past 10 years, a consistent pattern emerges: The companies that lost their founders underperformed both the broader market and their founder-led peers. Only one of seven companies in that group beat the S&P over five years: Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB -0.38%).

FedEx (FDX -0.28%)

• 10-year CAGR: 9.7% vs. S&P 500’s 13.6%
• 5-year CAGR: 9.1% vs. S&P 500’s 13.1%
• Founder Fred Smith ran the company for 51 years before stepping down as CEO in 2022.

FedEx has faced margin pressure and a shift in logistics demand tied to e-commerce, structural changes that would challenge any CEO. Under Smith, however, the company consistently adapted to industry shifts for decades. Since his departure, FedEx has struggled to find its footing, and the stock has trailed the S&P 500 across recent time horizons.

Amazon (AMZN -0.87%)

• 10-year CAGR: 23.8% vs. S&P 500’s 13.6%
• 5-year CAGR: 7.8% vs. S&P 500’s 13.1%
• Founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO in July 2021. Andy Jassy took over.

Amazon’s 10-year return is exceptional, but Bezos was CEO for most of that period. The five-year return, which captures the leadership transition, tells a different story. Amazon’s slowdown in that period also reflects the broader growth-stock sell-off in 2022 and the difficulty of maintaining hypergrowth at Amazon’s scale. Still, the gap between Amazon’s pre- and postfounder trajectory is hard to ignore.

PDD Holdings (PDD +0.98%)

• 5-year CAGR: -9.9% vs. S&P 500’s 13.1%
• Stock lost 40.5% of its value over five years
• Founder Colin Huang stepped down as CEO in 2020 and left the board in 2021.

PDD’s relatively poor performance over the last five years is driven by factors beyond a founder departure. Chinese regulatory crackdowns, U.S.-China trade tensions, and increased competition from Alibaba (BABA +0.75%) and JD.com (JD +1.36%) weighed on results. But Huang’s exit also arguably removed the strategic force behind Pinduoduo and the launch of Temu, and it occurred during a period of heightened geopolitical volatility. Among the 26 companies in the analysis, PDD posted the worst return of any stock in any time period.

Berkshire Hathaway: A Real-Time Test Case

• 10-year CAGR: 14.2% vs. S&P 500’s 13.6%
• 2025 return: +10.9% vs. S&P 500’s +17.9%
• Warren Buffett announced his retirement in May 2025 and stepped down as CEO on Jan. 1, 2026.

Unlike the other companies in this group, Berkshire Hathaway has little postdeparture performance data. Warren Buffett wasn’t technically the founder, but his 60-year tenure made him functionally indistinguishable from one. How Berkshire performs under new CEO Greg Abel will be closely watched as a real-time test of the founder-led thesis.

Founder departures do not automatically cause underperformance, and founder presence alone does not explain returns. But the data show a clear pattern: Public companies that had a founder-CEO depart within the past decade underperformed both the S&P 500 and their founder-led peers over 5- and 10-year periods, with the performance gap widening during the more challenging 5-year window.

Why Founder-Led Companies Outperform the Market: 4 Structural Advantages

No single factor explains the performance gap. Academic research and our own analysis point to a combination of four structural advantages that are difficult for hired CEOs to replicate.

1. Skin in the game

Founders typically hold significant equity stakes, tying their personal wealth directly to their company’s stock price.

• A hired CEO with a three-year option package has a fundamentally different relationship with long-term risk.
• Founder-CEOs such as Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Platforms), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies (DELL +1.21%)), and Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) each have billions of dollars in personal exposure to their companies’ shares.
• Research by Ohio State University professor Rüdiger Fahlenbrach found that founder-CEO outperformance persists even after controlling for company ownership.

2. Willingness to make bold bets

Founder-CEOs often demonstrate a greater appetite for risk than hired CEOs. Bain & Company calls this phenomenon “insurgency,” the willingness to challenge industry norms on behalf of underserved customers. It’s one of the three core traits Bain identified after studying hundreds of founder-led companies. A few examples are apparent in the group of companies analyzed:

• Zuckerberg spent more than $100 billion pivoting Meta toward AI infrastructure. He had previously made big bets on the metaverse, virtual reality, wearable tech, and other products not directly tied to the core social media business.
• Elon Musk has made robotics and energy storage an important part of Tesla’s future .
• Andrew Chesky reimagined Airbnb (ABNB -1.07%) during COVID-19 when revenue cratered. He shifted the company’s focus from urban short-term stays to long-term and rural travel, a move that took the company from near-collapse to a $100 billion IPO valuation in less than a year.

3. Long-term orientation

The median tenure of an S&P 500 company CEO is 4.8 years, according to business intelligence firm Equilar. That time frame might be long enough to optimize operations, but it is often too short to fundamentally transform a business.

Founders don’t face the same constraint. They can plan to remain in place long enough to see major strategic bets pay off, enabling them to commit to long-term visions that shorter-tenured executives might be reluctant to pursue.

• Jeff Bezos ran Amazon at a loss for years while building Amazon Web Services (AWS) into a dominant and highly profitable cloud business.
• Jensen Huang invested heavily in AI computing infrastructure long before the generative-AI breakthroughs reshaped the technology landscape.
• Elon Musk took Tesla from a niche luxury electric vehicle company to a large-scale automaker that competes in mass-market categories.

4. Greater emphasis on innovation and R&D

A founder’s long-term vision often translates into sustained investment in research and development. Purdue University researchers found that founder-CEO firms produce 31% more patents and that those patents tend to be more valuable. Fahlenbrach’s research also shows that founder-CEOs spend more on R&D and capital expenditures. Several examples illustrate how that investment discipline can compound over time:

• Nvidia reinvested aggressively in GPU architecture for more than a decade before AI made it among the most in-demand technologies. R&D spending grew from $1.3 billion in 2015 to over $12 billion by 2025, all under Huang’s leadership.
• Fortinet built proprietary security chips (ASICs) in-house rather than relying on off-the-shelf components, a more expensive approach that created a durable performance advantage competitors couldn’t easily replicate.
• Blackstone, under Schwarzman, expanded from private equity into real estate, credit, and infrastructure through disciplined acquisitions.
• CrowdStrike (CRWD +0.01%), co-founded by CEO George Kurtz in 2011 after he served as CTO of McAfee, invested heavily in building a single-platform cybersecurity architecture (Falcon) at a time when the industry norm was selling segmented, compartmentalized products. This long-term R&D bet created switching costs competitors can’t match. That level of product concentration, however, is not without risk, as showcased by the July 2024 outage that disrupted more than 8 million Windows PCs and led to a rapid decline in CrowdStrike’s stock price.

None of these advantages guarantees outperformance in every case. Regeneron’s founder has served as CEO for 37 years, yet the stock has underperformed the S&P 500 over the last decade. Salesforce has also faced recent challenges despite Marc Benioff’s continued leadership.

But on average, across both 5- and 10-year periods and in academic literature, the structural advantages of founder-led companies, on average, have translated into meaningfully higher returns.

Methodology

This analysis identified 19 founder-led publicly traded companies in the S&P 500, defined as those in which a founder or co-founder currently serves as CEO. A seven-company group of well-known, publicly traded companies in which a founder recently stepped down as CEO was also reviewed. The S&P 500 served as the benchmark.

Founder-led companies analyzed:

1. Nvidia
2. Tesla
3. MercadoLibre
4. Apollo Global Management
5. Fortinet
6. Blackstone
7. KKR & Co.
8. Meta Platforms
9. BlackRock
10. Capital One Financial
11. Intercontinental Exchange
12. Salesforce
13. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
14. Palantir Technologies (PLTR -1.65%)
15. CrowdStrike
16. Spotify Technology (SPOT +1.16%)
17. Dell Technologies
18. DoorDash (DASH -0.17%)
19. Airbnb

Companies in which the founder recently departed as CEO:

1. Synopsys (SNPS -1.43%)
2. Netflix (NFLX +1.06%)
3. Amazon
4. Berkshire Hathaway
5. Prologis (PLD -0.19%)
6. FedEx
7. PDD Holdings

Performance was measured using closing prices on – or the closest trading day to – Feb. 1, 2016, and Feb. 1, 2026 (10-year period) and Feb. 1, 2021, and Feb. 1, 2026 (5-year period). For each stock, total return, annualized return (CAGR), and alpha versus the S&P 500 were calculated. The 5-year window includes all 26 stocks; the 10-year window includes the 19 companies that were publicly traded as of 2016.

This portfolio was constructed using today’s founder-led companies and measured retrospectively. As a result, the analysis reflects survivorship bias: The sample consists of companies that are currently large and successful, and a broader sample of all founder-led companies, including those not in the S&P 500, would include failures. Returns shown reflect price appreciation only and exclude dividends, which modestly understates total returns for dividend-paying stocks and the S&P 500 benchmark.

Sources

• Bain & Company (2017). “Restoring a Founder’s Mentality® Culture.”
• Equilar (2023). “CEO Tenure Rates.”
• Joon Mahn Lee, Jongsoo Kim, and Joonhyung Bae (2016). “Founder CEOs and Innovation: Evidence from S&P 500 Firms.”
• Harvard Business Review (2016). “Founder-Led Companies Outperform the Rest — Here’s Why.”
• The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (2009). “Founder-CEOs, Investment Decisions, and Stock Market Performance.”

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About the Author

Jack Caporal is the Research Director for The Motley Fool and Motley Fool Money. Jack leads efforts to identify and analyze trends shaping investing and personal financial decisions across the United States. His research has appeared in thousands of media outlets including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and CNBC, and has been cited in congressional testimony. He previously covered business and economic trends as a reporter and policy analyst in Washington, D.C. He serves as Chair of the Trade Policy Committee at the World Trade Center in Denver, Colorado. He holds a B.A. degree in International Relations with a concentration in International Economics from Michigan State University.

TMFJackCap

Jack Caporal has positions in Airbnb. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Airbnb, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Blackstone, CrowdStrike, DoorDash, Fortinet, KKR, MercadoLibre, Meta Platforms, Netflix, Nvidia, Palantir Technologies, Prologis, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Salesforce, Spotify Technology, Synopsys, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends Alibaba Group, BlackRock, Capital One Financial, FedEx, Intercontinental Exchange, and JD.com. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.