5 CEOs Who Started As Interns and Run Companies Like Nike, Target

Nike CEO Elliott Hill is a veteran of the sportswear giant who worked at the company for 32 years before initially retiring in 2020. In October 2024, he returned to the Oregon-headquartered company to succeed John Donahoe as the CEO.

Hill started his career at Nike as an apparel sales intern in 1988.

Fiddelke is set to replace retiring CEO Brian Cornell, who has held the role since 2014. The soon-to-be chief exec has worked at Target for more than 20 years in roles across merchandising, finance, operations, and human resources. He is currently Target’s chief operating officer and was chief financial officer before that.

Fiddelke worked at Deloitte for three years before he began at Target. He got started in 2003 as a finance intern while pursuing his MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

General Motors’ Mary Barra went from co-op student to CEO, as she wrote on LinkedIn. She started her career in 1980 through a co-op program with the General Motors Institute, now called Kettering University, where she studied electrical engineering.

“As a co-op student, I rotated through the different functions on 6- to 12-week assignments,” Barra wrote in a 2016 LinkedIn post. “It was amazing to see the entire enterprise from both granular and holistic points of view. It opened my eyes to the many different careers that someone could pursue within a large company like GM.”

She became GM’s CEO in 2014 after more than 30 years at the company, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Ursula Burns served as CEO of Xerox, a document management company, from 2009 to 2016. She started her career at the company as an intern in 1980 and made headlines as the first Black woman to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

“By the way, that can be advantageous. For 10 years at Xerox, I was the only Black woman in the room,” Burns told the Harvard Business Review in 2021 when asked about being a minority in the workplace.

Dennis Muilenburg was the CEO of the global aerospace company Boeing from 2015 to 2019. He started off as an engineering intern in 1985 and eventually became the COO before replacing James McNerney as the CEO, Boeing said when he was appointed to the role.

Muilenburg resigned from his post as CEO and from the board in 2019. His departure came as the company faced the fallout of two crashes involving a 737 Max Plane in 2018 and 2019.