CEO Tracker
Every CEO at every S&P 500 company since 2005, sourced from SEC filings.
Coverage
500 companies. Every CEO since 2005, with start and end dates pulled from the actual SEC filings that announced them. Founders or incumbents already serving when the window opens get anchored to the earliest filing that names them, which is usually that year's annual proxy.
Validated against the Gentry et al. CEO turnover dataset, the standard reference in management research (S&P 1500, 2000-2018). 408 of 500 companies fall inside Gentry's window. 806 CEO records match. Of the 445 cases where both sides have a precise date, 70% match to the day and another 13% are 1-day shifts (Dec 31 vs Jan 1 conventions). Around 5% disagree by more than a month. On the ones I spot-checked against the SEC filing, the SEC-sourced date was usually right. Where Gentry lists CEOs not in this dataset, most are either entity rebrands (different legal company under a new CIK) or attribution mistakes in their CSV, not missed transitions. Gentry stops in 2018, this runs to today.
How the data was built
Filings are filtered in stages, cheap to expensive:
- Pull every 8-K, 10-K, and DEF 14A filed by each ticker since 2005
- Sentence-level keyword and regex filter
- spaCy dependency parsing to confirm the named person is grammatically the subject of the transition verb
- Claude Haiku extracts structured records (name, role, date, predecessor, successor) from the survivors
- A tenure builder dedupes raw events into per-CEO stints, handling co-CEOs, interim-to-permanent promotions, mid-window CIK changes (Google -> Alphabet), and pre-window incumbents
- Manual verification on anything still flagged, with durable corrections written back, where necessary.
A separate baseline pipeline covers what the transition record cannot: a company that has never filed a CEO change at all, either because leadership has not changed since it listed or because the change predates the CIK it files under today.
Limitations
- Coverage starts in 2005.
- Some dates are flagged inferred or tentative when the filing doesn't pin them to a day. Visible on company pages.
- Manual verification handles flagged structural issues. Not every individual date is independently fact-checked as a small minority may scrape through the cracks.
- When a ticker has changed entities over time (mergers, spinoffs, ticker reuse), only the current entity's CEOs are tracked.