Aflac’s CEO gave us that obnoxious, genius duck and changed the insurance industry. Now, he’s facing his aging customers’ mortality—and eventually his own

Thirty-four years running the same company: It’s not that long, cosmically speaking, and yet today’s world is in some ways unrecognizably different from 1990. The American president then was George Bush (the first one). The Soviet Union was still standing, while China was just emerging as a global superpower. The internet had barely started crawling into U.S. homes, and smartphones were decades away from upending how we all live. It was a world before Facebook, Google, Amazon, or ChatGPT.

1990 was when Aflac chairman and CEO Dan Amos started running the oddball life insurer founded by his father and two uncles. When Amos took over, his family’s company was not yet “AFLAAAAC!” The TV-commercial squawking of Aflac’s duck mascot, which Amos unleashed in 2000, would go on to create a pop-culture phenomenon—one that helped change how all insurance is sold.

Over those 34 years, Amos grew his family’s company into a Fortune 500 fixture, with $18.7 billion in revenue last year. Its annual sales have increased sevenfold over his tenure. Its shares were trading at around $85 in late March, far beyond their (split-adjusted) 1990 value of $1. In Japan, where Aflac does the majority of its business, the company is about to celebrate its 50^th anniversary. And in the United States, where Aflac in 2008 became the first publicly-traded company to give shareholders an annual “say on pay” vote, Amos has helped shape the corporate landscape of today.

“I’ve experienced it all,” Amos told me recently, sitting in Aflac’s blocky tower in Columbus, Ga., which his predecessors built in 1975. At age 72, he is now the fifth-longest-serving CEO of any Fortune 500 company. (Berkshire Hathaway’s 93-year-old Warren Buffett holds the longest tenure.)

It’s a tremendous and rare accomplishment, especially given that the average Fortune 500 CEO lasts seven years. At several years past the traditional (and, at some companies, mandated) U.S. retirement age of 65, Amos has outlasted many of his contemporaries and seen multiple would-be successors, including his son, retire or resign. And by now he’s used to global upheaval: “He’s been able to navigate a pandemic, a changing rate environment, and a changing product portfolio admirably well,” says John Barnidge, a Piper Sandler analyst who covers Aflac and other insurers.

But despite the vampire fantasies of biohacking Silicon Valley billionaires, no CEO lives—or works—forever. Amos is closer to the end of his tenure than its beginning—even if, like Buffett, he clearly relishes what he does and plans to keep on doing it as long as he physically can. “There’s only so many fish I can catch,” Amos says. “I’m not going to be that good of a retiree.”

His company is also aging and showing the limits of its long-ago innovations. Aflac’s annual sales have been shrinking since 2019 and have shed more than $6 billion from their 2012 high of $25.4 billion. In Japan, where Aflac makes 70% of its profits, its core customers are aging—and dying out—at an alarming rate. And in the United States, where Aflac mostly sells nice-to-have but not strictly necessary “supplemental” insurance, it’s facing regulatory scrutiny, changing customer attitudes, and the basic challenge of selling expensive extras to inflation-squeezed consumers.

All that, plus a CEO whose long tenure inevitably raises questions about how he’s preparing the company to thrive after him. “Longevity brings stability,” says Cathy Seifert, an insurance-industry analyst for CFRA Research. "But are you marking time? Or are you staying relevant and dynamic?”

As a company, Aflac has always been—forgive me—an odd duck. It’s based in deep Georgia, on the border of Alabama—yet most of its sales happen across the globe, in Japan. It’s a family-run business that has had two CEOs in its 69-year history—Dan and his uncle John—but no longer has an Amos heir waiting in the wings. And despite its mascot’s larger-than-life presence, Aflac sells very little insurance directly to American consumers.

What Aflac mostly sells in the United States is supplemental insurance—disability or accident or dental or vision insurance that your employer might offer while you enroll in your annual benefits. As a result, Aflac relies mostly on third parties—employers and contractor insurance brokers—to sell its products in the United States.

One major challenge for Aflac’s core U.S. business growth is the increased cost of living. Americans who buy cars or homes are usually required to insure them—but amid recent crushing inflation, the supplemental nature of Aflac’s insurance products makes them a relative luxury for cash-strapped potential customers.

Inflation is “always a concern,” Amos acknowledges. But Aflac’s U.S. sales did tick up 5% last year, and he points out that it could be much worse. “I was around in the Carter years,” he says, invoking the record “stagflation” of the late 1970s. “This is no inflation compared to then.”

His office was around then, too. The whole vibe is very old-fashioned men’s club: dark wood, carpets, oil paintings of his two (now adult) children on the wall, a bronzed wooden bookend—in the shape of a duck, of course—on his desk. Amos himself, a courteous Southern grandfather who relishes the chance to tell a story, has wings of blondish hair, round tortoiseshell glasses, and the executive fashion sense of a pre-Zuckerberg era: suit, loafers, pocket square. His tie (like all his ties, according to a colleague) is printed with ducks—and it’s nearly impossible to step off an elevator in the complex without being confronted by larger-than-life posters or artwork or stuffed versions of the waterfowl. They’re even on the blue Aflac sign atop the tower, still the tallest building in Columbus.

But if Aflac’s home base at first appears dedicated to the duck, it’s fundamentally an older—and stranger—shrine to its founding family. Outside, the multilevel parking garage is capped by the now-decaying house that John Amos, the current CEO’s uncle and predecessor, built on top of it. Paintings of past and current Amos men, in evolving eras’ suit styles, flank important entrances. Upstairs from Dan’s desk, his late father’s office is preserved, as if for a museum, next to the boardroom named for him—“Chairman Paul S. Amos,” or, as longtime employees refer to him, “Mr. Paul.”

The company was founded in 1955 by Paul Amos and his brothers John and Bill, who moved up from the Florida panhandle for the specific purpose of setting up an insurer. At the time, Columbus was the largest Southeastern city without an established insurance competitor—as Fortune chronicled in a 2004 feature framed on Amos’s wall. (Originally the American Family Life Insurance Co., the name eventually swapped “Assurance” for “Insurance,” then evolved into the acronym Aflac.)

Today, Dan Amos—who owns 0.5% of the company’s shares and 1.3% of voting shares—has turned his family business into a powerhouse, with more than 12,700 full-time employees globally. But its sales model, in particular its reliance on independent contractors, has sometimes gotten Aflac into reputational and legal hot water. Six years ago, the company faced a series of lawsuits alleging that Aflac used deceptive recruiting tactics, pressured employees to sell products without customer authorization, and misclassified employees as independent contractors. Aflac denied the claims in these lawsuits, which have since been dismissed or sent to arbitration, and today Amos glosses over the legal troubles: “We’ve had some things that have come up, but in all the cases, we’ve ended up coming out very strong.”

He is similarly dismissive of pending federal regulatory changes that would require some of Aflac’s U.S. customers to pay taxes on benefits they receive. But Aflac faces arguably an even bigger problem: In a world where you can buy almost anything with a few clicks, the company relies on what Seifert calls an “antiquated distribution system” throughout the highly regulated (and technologically creaky) life insurance industry.

“Consumer preferences have shifted to doing everything online,” she says. “That’s the challenge that I don’t think a whole lot of life insurance companies, Aflac included, have successfully met.”

Personally, Amos certainly isn’t anti-tech: The invention of the smartphone “changed my life,” he told me, by allowing him to prolong his CEO tenure without missing out on family obligations. Now he can accompany his wife to the Atlanta antique shows she loves, or work from his Massachusetts vacation home during the first month of a pandemic, while remaining connected to his company.

But he’s skeptical about using smartphone apps or other low-touch, high-tech, millennial- and Gen Z–friendly platforms to sell Aflac’s U.S. products. “Our insurance is sold, not bought,” Amos says, explaining that supplemental insurance’s discretionary nature means “you have to sit down and explain to [customers] why they need it.”

When I told a Japanese friend that I was traveling to Georgia to interview Aflac’s CEO, she was puzzled: “That’s a Japanese company, isn’t it? The one with the duck?”

And indeed, from its good ol’ Southern base, the Amos brothers’ company has become, somehow, big in Japan. In 1970, the story goes, John traveled to Osaka for the world’s fair and noticed that people frequently wore medical masks in public. It was half a century before a global pandemic would turn masking into a widespread health practice outside Asia, and John Amos saw an opportunity: Any culture that was so public health conscious would likely rush to buy more insurance, he reasoned. And he had already invented just the right product.

In 1957, after the three men’s father died of cancer, John Amos saw a business opportunity in his family’s loss: What if Aflac could sell “cancer insurance”? Customers who were diagnosed received payments to cover the costs their health insurance generally didn’t: hiring home health aides, traveling for treatment, paying for hotel rooms when relatives came to visit.

In the U.S., Aflac fueled its early growth by selling these policies through smaller employers—but in Japan, where cancer rates had started rising dramatically in the 1950s as people’s average life span increased, Amos struck gold. Cancer was particularly stigmatized at that time in Japan, where doctors often wouldn’t even tell dying patients what was killing them. None of Aflac’s local competitors wanted to touch the disease, or the business of selling insurance against it—leaving the American interloper a lucrative window, and a chance to win over Japanese regulators.

Today, after half a century in the country, Aflac holds more than 58% of existing cancer insurance policies there, according to Moody’s. Crucially, in a country that remains famously resistant to immigration or foreign influence, Aflac’s half-century of history has built a reservoir of trust and brand recognition. Dan Amos doesn’t speak the language, beyond “a few words,” but his company, which has hired Japanese executives to run its local operations since the 1970s, seems entrenched in the country’s business and culture. In 2023, about 60 percent of Aflac’s revenue and 70 percent of its profits came from Japan.

But now that dominance has become a mixed blessing. Japan’s economy is mired in a years-long malaise and the yen has been weak. And the far more existential threat—for Aflac and for the very future of Japan—is that its customers are aging and, slowly, dying out. More than 10% of Japan’s population is 80 or older; in late February, the country said the number of babies born in 2023 had fallen for an eighth straight year, to a new record low. Its population is on track to shrink 30% by 2070.

Japan’s declining population is “definitely a challenge,” says Seifert, “and a risk.” It also previews a slower-moving problem for the United States: In November, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that the country’s population would start shrinking by the end of the century (adding that, without the effects of immigration, that decline would have already started this year).

Aflac’s cancer focus provides some bleak upside to these demographic trends, as rates of the disease are skyrocketing. “Cancer is a disease of the aging,” Piper Sandler’s Barnidge points out. As people get older, more fall prey to the disease, and it stands to reason that more will jump at a chance to buy insurance against some of the costs associated with it.

Of course, aging customers are also more likely to get sick and to need a payout. For Aflac, or any life insurer, growth depends on selling premiums to healthier customers who are going to pay for protection they are statistically less likely to need. And Aflac is taking some steps to do that: In September, it started targeting younger, healthier Japanese consumers with a revamped supplemental insurance product, “with the idea that we’ll go back and tack on additional coverage later on, as they get older,” Amos says.

And then, he adds, there’s always his not-so-secret weapon: “The Aflac duck is very popular over there—and that helps us sell to younger people.”

A couple of days after I met with Amos, an episode of Jeopardy! aired with this clue: “Thanks to a duck saying its name, this company said its brand recognition jumped from 11% to 94% in 14 years.” The correct response, of course: “What is Aflac?”

The company’s obnoxious mascot is the professional pride and joy of Dan Amos, who has said that he “bet my entire life on a damn duck.” It was late 1999—almost a decade after he had become CEO, after his uncle John died of lung cancer—and Aflac needed a boost. Its advertising agency presented Amos with two different potential TV commercials: One involved a traditional, sober testimonial from the sitcom star Ray Romano. The other featured a duck squawking out the ungainly acronym that gave Aflac its name.

Amos picked the duck—in a decision that influenced his entire industry and how its products are still sold today. This was at the dawn of “that weird, quirky insurance advertising model that has now permeated everything,” Seifert recalls. Aflac’s braying duck and Geico’s talking gecko (introduced a few months earlier) paved the way for Liberty Mutual’s LiMu Emu, Allstate’s Mayhem, Jake from State Farm, and—as the New York Times recently highlighted in a magazine profile of actor Stephanie Courtney—the 16-year reign of Flo from Progressive.

Aflac’s sales doubled within the first three years of the mascot’s debut. “We took the chance—and it was well worth it,” Amos says.

The duck occasionally ruffled some customer feathers—especially in Japan, where Amos eventually launched a “softer” spokesfowl. The U.S. duck had long been voiced by Gilbert Gottfried; but after Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people, the comedian made a series of bad jokes on Twitter about the disaster. Aflac quickly fired Gottfried (who died in 2022). The duck, since voiced by less famous humans, was safe.

Still, the success of Aflac’s TV commercials can unintentionally highlight the limited portfolio of what Aflac actually sells. People will sometimes contact Aflac agents seeking property or casualty insurance or other products the company doesn’t offer, Amos volunteers. But he wants to be “methodical” about any future expansion. “What has helped me the most in my career is staying focused,” he says. “Everybody’s got an idea to get you off track.”

Despite all of the wacky waterfowl, cancer remains the grim center of Aflac’s business—and of the Amos family’s history.

The disease killed Amos’s grandfather, and then his uncle John, and then—last summer, at age 48—his son-in-law. “It was terrible,” Amos says. “I’ve seen it everywhere.” (In 1995 he set up a foundation to raise money for treating childhood cancer.)

So Aflac’s CEO is deeply familiar with death by now. He’s spent 34 years making himself and his family and his investors wealthy by selling his customers some peace of mind about their eventual endings. And he knows that in order for his company to succeed for decades beyond him, it has to reckon with its customers’ aging and encroaching mortality—as well as his own.

That conversation has taken on national resonance these days: As President Joseph Biden, 81, faces off again against former President Donald Trump, 77, the headlines have been dominated by pearl-clutching over the mental fitness of aging leaders.

Days before I interviewed Amos in February, a special counsel report calling Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory” set off a breathless news cycle about the president’s fitness to stand for reelection. Amos is almost a decade younger, but was clearly exasperated by the political chatter: When I asked about his own succession plans, he brought up Biden.

“The more you communicate publicly, the less you’ll be effective as the CEO,” he says. “They’re circling Biden now, for that same purpose—and if he gives a hint, it’s a feeding frenzy.”

Amos started at Aflac as a salesman at age 23, and he wants it known that he earned his chops; he’s not just a nepo baby. “I chose to go into sales, because it was objective,” he tells me. “If you made your numbers, as a general rule, you did well—and CEO is the same way.”

Amos says he still wants to be judged on his performance—which has been pretty good, notwithstanding the recent revenue declines. Aflac’s annualized shareholder returns over his tenure have been more than 15%, versus more than 10% for the S&P 500 index over the same period. And whenever he does step down, Aflac's investors will likely feel some short-term pain: On average, companies’ financial performance tends to drop 29 percent from the mean after a CEO retires, according to a working paper co-authored by Mo Wang, a professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.

Wang points out that, as the global tech and business landscape becomes ever-more complicated, companies with older leaders often benefit: “You want someone with a lot of experience, because they’ve seen a lot of low-probability things,” he says, adding that “these days, 72 is not that old.”

Amos acknowledges, “The older we get, we have to be monitored closer.” But he remains healthy, and reiterates what he has told investors several times over the past decade: “I see myself staying around for several more years.”

When Amos does eventually retire, it’s far from clear who will step into his shoes. He calls succession planning “my number one responsibility,” but says that the only people who need to know the details are his board members. “I think it’s very important that you lay out a plan,” he explains. “But you never set a date” or talk about the plan publicly, he says, adding—in a reflexive, perhaps-unconscious pun—that he wants to avoid becoming “a lame duck.”

Until 2017, it was widely assumed that Amos planned to eventually cede Aflac’s CEO job to his son, and the company’s then-president, Paul Amos II. But then, in a plot twist straight from the TV show Succession, the younger Amos left the company to join a private equity firm. “Entrepreneurship runs in my genes and … I want to be part of an enterprise I can help scale up and build out,” Paul told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer at the time, before adding that he didn’t expect his then-65-year-old dad to step back anytime soon: “Dan Amos retiring in five years would shock me.”

“Paul wanted to do his own thing,” his father says today. (Paul Amos did not respond to requests for comment.) And since his son left Aflac, Dan Amos hasn’t spoken publicly about who might succeed him. President and chief operating officer Fred Crawford, who in 2017 was seen as the most likely next Aflac CEO, in November announced his retirement at age 60. “I would go crazy if I had to quit that young,” Amos says, “but that’s what he wanted to do.”

Analysts are split on whether Amos’s public silence is the best way to approach succession planning or to set his eventual replacement up for success. “I don't get the sense that there is a front-and-center showcase of next-gen talent the way that there may be at some other companies,” Seifert says. “No one says you have to give us granular details—but I think perhaps more could be done to reassure people of a long-term plan.”

Even Warren Buffett, after all, eventually started publicly acknowledging that one of his Berkshire deputies, Greg Abel, will someday replace him. In his most recent annual letter to shareholders, published in February, Buffett wrote that Abel “in all respects is ready to be CEO of Berkshire tomorrow.”

But Amos's board, at least, seems fully behind his approach. “We have an emergency succession plan, should anything happen to our officers, and we spend plenty of time on how our executives are developing,” says Dr. Katherine Rohrer, Princeton’s former vice provost, who joined Aflac’s board in 2017 and oversees its succession planning as head of its corporate governance committee. But, she adds, “I hope Dan remains the CEO as long as possible!”

Whenever and however it occurs, Aflac’s leadership change will signal more than just a career transition. For Amos, passing off his company to someone outside of the family represents an inevitable but wrenching loss.

“I believe I’m a better CEO because of the family connection,” Amos says. “It feels like one of my children.”

It’s a bittersweet reality for Amos, whose career and family legacy have persuaded tens of millions of his customers to prepare for the worst of what fate can throw at us. But, he acknowledges, there are some endings that all the insurance in the world can’t prevent.

“It’s just part of life,” he says. “I know that it wasn’t going to stay that way forever.”

Longest tenured CEOs

The average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is seven years, but the four longest-serving company leaders have lasted decades. (It helps to have founded your company.)

Warren E. Buffett, 93, has led the multinational holding company Berkshire Hathaway (No. 7 on the 2023 Fortune 500) for 54 years.

Albert H. Nahmad, 82, founded the distributor of air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration equipment Watsco (No. 495) and has led it for 51 years.

Leonard S. Schleifer, 71, cofounded the biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (No. 339) and has led it for 36 years.

Stanley M. Bergman, 73, has led the distributor of medical and dental supplies Henry Schein (No. 325) for 35 years.

This article appears in the April/May 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline, “The truth even he can't duck.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com