FY2025 · NYSE: IBM · CIK 0000051143 · Founded 1911
IBM Leadership
Who founded IBM, who runs it today, and the multi-CEO modern arc — Akers, Gerstner, Palmisano, Rometty, Krishna — that defined four-plus decades of strategic reinvention. Sourced from the most recent DEF 14A proxy statement filed March 10, 2026 with the SEC, the April 28, 2026 annual-meeting Item 5.07 8-K, and IBM's own leadership page.
Roster row: IBM on /orgs/. Sibling page: IBM Financials (in flight).
Founders — the 1911 merger and the 1924 rename
IBM was incorporated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a merger of three predecessor companies orchestrated by financier Charles Ranlett Flint. The largest of the three predecessors was Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, whose punched-card system had been used for the 1890 U.S. Census. The company was renamed International Business Machines in 1924 under Thomas J. Watson Sr., who had joined as President in 1914 and ran the company for the next four decades. No living founder remains; the page surfaces Watson Sr. alongside Flint and Hollerith because he is the operational founder of IBM-as-we-know-it.
The financier who engineered the 1911 merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Company of America into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Known in his era as the “Father of Trusts” for assembling roll-ups across multiple industries. Never held a CEO role at CTR/IBM; recruited Watson Sr. as general manager in 1914.
Inventor of the electromechanical punched-card tabulator used to process the 1890 U.S. Census. Founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896; sold it into the 1911 CTR merger. Remained as a consulting engineer through the early CTR years and retired in 1921. The technology line Hollerith started in 1890 ran in IBM products into the 1970s.
Recruited to CTR in 1914 from National Cash Register, where he had been a senior sales executive under John Patterson. Renamed CTR to International Business Machines in 1924. Built the punched-card, accounting-machine, and electric-typewriter franchises that carried IBM through the 1950s. Promoted his son Thomas Jr. to President in 1952 and stepped down as CEO in 1956 weeks before his death. Treated here as the operational founder of IBM-as-we-know-it.
The three-card founders strip on this page is the matched-set CoreWeave / Palantir shape adapted for a company old enough that none of its founders are living. The card with Watson Sr. doubles as the bridge into the modern lineage; the Watson dynasty has its own subsection below.
The Watson dynasty — 1914–1971
For 57 of IBM's first 60 years, a Watson ran the company. Thomas Sr. led from 1914 until weeks before his death in 1956; his son Thomas Jr. took the seat and held it for fifteen years, building the System/360 mainframe that defined enterprise computing for a generation. The handoff to T. Vincent Learson in 1971 ended the family-leadership era; every CEO since has been a non-family operator. The dynasty matters here as foundational pre-modern lineage, not as active leadership.
Krishna's path to the CEO seat ran through Red Hat
The April 2020 Rometty-to-Krishna CEO transition was a strategic-continuity handoff rather than a change-and-pivot. From 2017 to April 2020, Krishna led IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software business unit, and per the proxy he was “a principal architect of the acquisition of Red Hat, the largest acquisition in the Company's history” — announced October 2018, closed July 2019 at $34 billion. Promoting Krishna in 2020 promoted the architect of the hybrid-cloud strategy that Red Hat was meant to operationalize. He had previously directed IBM Research from 2015 to 2020 and run the Systems and Technology Group before that. He joined IBM in 1990; the 2020 CEO appointment was the culmination of a 30-year internal track record.
Former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joined IBM as President at the July 2019 deal close, stepped into a Senior Adviser role in July 2021, and left the company shortly after. The President title sat vacant from 2021 until Krishna picked it up in addition to Chairman and CEO — the current proxy lists his combined title as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer.
Modern-CEO arc — five eras since 1985
Five CEOs across forty-plus years; each tenure maps to a distinct strategic era. Newest first. Color-coded so the lineage scans at a glance. The earlier (pre-1985) Watson Jr. / Learson / Cary / Opel CEOs are surfaced in the Historical CEO timeline further down.
Current executive officers
IBM's named executive officers (“NEOs”) for fiscal year 2025 per the March 2026 DEF 14A. The proxy reports 20 directors and executive officers in the beneficial-ownership table; the five NEOs disclosed in the Summary Compensation Table are shown here. Ages are per the proxy. Click any row for the bio detail.
Arvind Krishna
63
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
1990
Joined IBM in 1990. Led the IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software business unit 2017–2020 (the role from which he architected the 2019 Red Hat acquisition) and ran IBM Research as its director 2015–2020. Became CEO and a director in April 2020; elected Chairman in December 2020. Holds outside board seats at Northrop Grumman and at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Class B director, 2022 onward). PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur.
James J. Kavanaugh
—
Senior Vice President, Finance & Operations & Chief Financial Officer
—
CFO since 2018. The proxy credits the 2025 portfolio optimization and productivity work with ~100 basis points of operating pre-tax margin expansion, $4.5 billion in annual run-rate savings since 2023, $14.7 billion of free cash flow, and the funding of 10 strategic acquisitions in 2025 alongside more than $6 billion returned to stockholders. The longest-tenured of IBM's NEOs in the current cohort.
Gary Cohn
—
Vice Chairman
2021
Former President and COO of Goldman Sachs (2006–2016) and former Director of the U.S. National Economic Council (2017–2018). Joined IBM as Vice Chairman in 2021. The proxy describes the role as senior-relationship and public-private-partnership-focused: representing IBM in high-level external forums and driving revenue growth through ecosystem and policy engagement. Unusual structural position — not a functional head, but a Section 16 reporting officer compensated at NEO scale.
Robert D. Thomas
—
Senior Vice President, Software & Chief Commercial Officer
—
Runs IBM's Software segment and the company's go-to-market organization. The proxy credits him with 9% Software revenue growth at constant currency in 2025 and with scaling the generative-AI book of business in Software to over $2 billion inception-to-date. Heads the watsonx product surface and the AI-anchored portion of IBM's hybrid-cloud strategy.
Anne Robinson
—
Senior Vice President & Chief Legal Officer
—
Chief Legal Officer; oversees legal and regulatory affairs across IBM's AI, quantum, M&A, and Consulting work. The proxy highlights her 2025 contributions in streamlining IBM's contracting process and policies and in deploying technology inside the legal organization to accelerate cycle time. Successor to Michelle Browdy, the prior GC who appears in the NEO table for 2021–2023 but not since.
Ages and tenure are as listed in the most recent DEF 14A; an em dash means the field is not separately disclosed in the proxy and the page declines to assert a value from secondary sources. Beyond these five NEOs, the proxy's beneficial-ownership table lists 20 directors and executive officers in aggregate — the additional Section 16 officers (heads of IBM Consulting, Infrastructure, Research, HR, etc.) are publicly visible on IBM's own leadership page. The NEO set is the page's SEC-canonical baseline.
Board of directors
Thirteen directors as of the April 28, 2026 annual meeting. Alex Gorsky is the independent Lead Director. Frederick H. Waddell did not stand for re-election; the By-laws were amended to decrease the board size to 13 effective April 28, 2026 (Item 5.03 8-K). Ramon Laguarta (PepsiCo Chairman/CEO) joined effective March 1, 2026 (Item 5.03 8-K). Click any row for the committee memberships and short bio.
Arvind Krishna
63
Chairman, President and CEO, IBM
2020
Chair of the Executive Committee. The only management director on the board. Not independent. Outside boards: Northrop Grumman; Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Class B). See the executive officers section above for the bio.
Alex Gorsky
65
Lead Independent Director · Former Chairman/CEO, Johnson & Johnson
2014
Lead Independent Director with defined duties including presiding over executive sessions of non-management directors, calling meetings of independent directors, participating in Board agenda design, and CEO-performance evaluation. Member of the Executive Committee. CEO of Johnson & Johnson 2012–2022 and Chairman 2012–2023.
Marianne C. Brown
67
Former COO, Global Financial Solutions, Fidelity National Information Services
2023
Member of the Directors and Corporate Governance Committee. Served as COO of FIS's Global Financial Solutions organization 2018–2019; prior career in institutional and wholesale financial-services technology.
Thomas Buberl
52
Chief Executive Officer, AXA S.A.
2020
Chair of the Executive Compensation and Management Resources Committee effective April 28, 2026 (succeeding Waddell). Joined the Executive Committee on the same date. CEO of AXA, the French multinational insurance group, since 2016.
David N. Farr
71
Retired Chairman/CEO, Emerson Electric Co.
2012
Member of the Audit Committee. CEO of Emerson Electric 2000–2021; Chairman 2004–2021. Industrial-conglomerate operating perspective on a board that otherwise tilts financial-services and consumer.
Michelle J. Howard
65
Retired Admiral, United States Navy
2019
Member of the Audit Committee. The first woman to attain the rank of four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy and the first woman and first African American Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Brings cybersecurity, defense-technology, and government-relations perspective to the board.
Ramon Laguarta
62
Chairman/CEO, PepsiCo, Inc.
Mar 2026
NewNewest director, elected effective March 1, 2026. Joined the Directors and Corporate Governance Committee effective the same date. CEO of PepsiCo since 2018, Chairman since 2019; joined PepsiCo in 1996.
Andrew N. Liveris
71
Retired Chairman/CEO, The Dow Chemical Company
2010
Chair of the Directors and Corporate Governance Committee. Member of the Executive Committee. The longest-tenured non-management director on the board. CEO of Dow Chemical 2004–2018; led the 2017 Dow–DuPont merger. Received the highest opposition share at the April 2026 election (~13% against), consistent with tenure-pushback patterns at long-tenured directors.
F. William McNabb III
68
Retired Chairman/CEO, The Vanguard Group, Inc.
2019
Member of the Audit Committee; Audit Committee Financial Expert. CEO of Vanguard 2008–2017; Chairman 2010–2018. The board's institutional-asset-management perspective from inside the firm that is also one of IBM's three largest stockholders.
Michael Miebach
57
Chief Executive Officer, Mastercard Incorporated
2023
Member of the Executive Compensation and Management Resources Committee. CEO of Mastercard since January 2021. Sitting-CEO peer perspective.
Martha E. Pollack
67
President Emerita, Cornell University
2019
Member of the Executive Compensation and Management Resources Committee. President of Cornell University 2017–2024; previously Provost of the University of Michigan. Computer-science academic with research positions in artificial intelligence; the only academic on the board.
Peter R. Voser
67
Retired Chief Executive Officer, Royal Dutch Shell plc
2015
Chair of the Audit Committee; Audit Committee Financial Expert. Member of the Executive Committee. Member of the Executive Compensation and Management Resources Committee. CEO of Royal Dutch Shell 2009–2013; Chairman of ABB 2015–2024. Three-committee assignment makes him the most active independent director on the board.
Alfred W. Zollar
71
Former Executive Advisor, Siris Capital Group, LLC
2021
Member of the Directors and Corporate Governance Committee. Former Executive Advisor at Siris Capital Group, the technology-focused private-equity firm. Brings private-equity / cloud-technology perspective from his Siris engagements with cloud-based technology providers.
Committee structure (post April 28, 2026): Audit — Voser (Chair), Farr, Howard, McNabb. Directors and Corporate Governance — Liveris (Chair), Brown, Laguarta, Zollar. Executive Compensation and Management Resources — Buberl (Chair), Miebach, Pollack, Voser. Executive — Krishna (Chair), Gorsky, Liveris, Voser, Buberl. Twelve of the 13 directors are independent under NYSE rules; Krishna is the only management director. The board is elected annually with majority-voting in uncontested elections.
Voting structure — single share class, broadly held, no founder concentration
IBM has a single class of common stock with one vote per share. As of February 10, 2026, there were 938,034,404 shares outstanding and entitled to vote. There is no founder voting concentration: Charles Flint and Herman Hollerith both died in the early 1930s; no descendant of the Watson family holds a controlling position. Institutional concentration is the only material voting block, and it follows the standard large-cap pattern.
The three largest holders disclosed in the most recent proxy:
- The Vanguard Group — 92,822,090 shares, 10.03% of common stock.
- BlackRock Inc. — 75,479,656 shares, 8.3% of common stock.
- State Street Corporation — 55,035,821 shares, 6.03% of common stock.
The combined institutional top-three holds ~24.4% of the float, matching the index-fund concentration pattern that holds across S&P 500 large-caps. IBM's directors and executive officers as a group (20 people) held ~0.16% — non-management directors collectively owned ~263,000 shares as of the FY2025 record date, an average of ~$6.5 million per non-management director. No officer or director individually crosses the 1% threshold.
Structurally, IBM is the matched-set counter-example to every other governance shape on this site:
- Vs. founder concentration — Larry Ellison personally controls ~40% of Oracle's common stock; IBM has none.
- Vs. dual-class super-voting — Palantir has Class F super-voting in a Founder Voting Trust, Alphabet and Meta have 10:1 Class B insider supervoting; IBM is single-class with one-vote-per-share.
- Vs. private founder personal control — Elon Musk's xAI / Anthropic-pre-LTBT / Cognition examples concentrate governance in a single founder; IBM has no founder voice at all in 2026.
The broadly-held single-class shape is one of the cleaner versions of that pattern in the AI-adjacent public-company universe and is the cap-table fact behind IBM's long-standing dividend-paying posture (more than 100 consecutive quarterly dividends; an S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat).
Historical CEO timeline — the full 1914–present lineage
The complete chief executive line from the Watson dynasty onward. The modern arc covered above starts at Akers (1985); this section adds the earlier seats that shaped IBM's pre-modern era. Newest first.
Show the pre-1985 CEO lineage
The pre-Akers segment of the page is intentionally lighter on prose than the modern arc — a deep treatment of the Cary or Opel eras is out of scope for a leadership-page recipe whose center of gravity is the proxy's current officer and director rosters. The historical-CEO context is provided so the modern arc reads in its full lineage.
Notable transitions and departures
Senior-officer and board-of-directors transitions since the Krishna CEO appointment. New entries land here as Item 5.02 8-Ks file off-cycle between annual meetings.
Long-history senior departures (pre-Krishna era) are not enumerated here — a comprehensive ex-officer roster going back to the Watson era would dilute the table's signal. New transitions land here as they file; the matched-set OpenAI and Anthropic leadership departures tables are the precedent for shape.
Federal and public-policy engagement
IBM has been a federal-government IT vendor for more than a century — the 1890 U.S. Census tabulator that Herman Hollerith built is the founding example, and IBM has held a position in U.S. federal computing across every executive-branch administration since. The company holds contracts across the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, civilian agencies, and the federal-civilian-IT-services market that federal tech spending tracks at the aggregate level.
In public-policy terms IBM has been a long-standing participant in the U.S. discussions on export controls, encryption policy, and (most recently) AI regulation. Krishna sits on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum; Gary Cohn's role as Vice Chairman is explicitly described in the proxy as “public-private partnerships” and senior external engagement. The page does not editorialize on those positions — the load-bearing point is structural: IBM's federal-and-policy footprint is large enough that leadership decisions there are material to the company.
Read these primary sources
Most of the page's content is paraphrased from the URLs below. They are the authoritative places to read what IBM has said in its own SEC filings, what the company posts on its own leadership page, and where the historical-CEO narrative was first written down.
IBM SEC filings
DEF 14A is the canonical source for officers, directors, and voting structure. The 10-K supplements with Item 10 “Directors and Executive Officers of the Registrant.” Item 5.02 8-Ks capture off-cycle officer / director changes between annual meetings.
# Most recent DEF 14A (filed 2026-03-10) — officers, directors, voting structure
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000005114326000025/ibm-20260306.htm
# 2026 annual meeting (April 28, 2026) Item 5.07 + 5.03 8-K — board size change, vote tallies
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000005114326000043/ibm-20260428.htm
# Laguarta election Item 5.02 + 5.03 8-K (March 3, 2026)
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000005114326000015/ibm-20260301.htm
# Most recent 10-K (FY2025, filed 2026-02-24)
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000005114326000010/ibm-20251231.htm
# IBM on EDGAR — full filing history
https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000051143
# EDGAR submissions JSON — full filing index
https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0000051143.jsonIBM's own pages
IBM publishes a marketing-oriented leadership page and an extensive corporate archive. The leadership page is the company-side counterpart to the proxy's officer roster.
# IBM leadership page (current officers as IBM markets them)
https://www.ibm.com/about/leadership
# IBM Investor Relations
https://www.ibm.com/investor/
# IBM Archives — Watson dynasty, historical CEOs, corporate history
https://www.ibm.com/history/
# IBM Research
https://research.ibm.com/Historical-CEO references
For the Gerstner turnaround narrative and the Watson-era founding history, the company-side and academic sources below are the canonical pointers.
# Gerstner's own account of the 1993-2002 turnaround
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/who-says-elephants-cant-dance-louis-v-gerstner-jr
# Computer History Museum — IBM materials
https://computerhistory.org/
# Smithsonian National Museum of American History — IBM and Watson-era materials
https://americanhistory.si.edu/Contemporaneous reporting
For coverage of each modern-CEO transition and the post-Krishna strategic-arc events (Kyndryl spinoff, watsonx launch, HashiCorp close).
# NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, Reuters — archive search "IBM"
https://www.nytimes.com/
https://www.wsj.com/
https://www.bloomberg.com/
https://www.ft.com/
https://www.reuters.com/Sources: IBM's own SEC filings — the March 2026 DEF 14A proxy statement for officers, directors, committees, and voting structure; the April 28, 2026 annual-meeting 8-K for the post-meeting board composition and vote tallies; the March 1, 2026 Laguarta-election 8-K; the FY2025 10-K; ibm.com/about/leadership for company-side titles; IBM Research; Louis Gerstner's Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? (HarperBusiness, 2002); contemporaneous reporting in NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, and Reuters. Reporter coverage is cited under fair use (linked, not republished).
Mungomash LLC · More org pages · IBM on /orgs/