United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby on calculated bets and building a US flag carrier

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby wants to build what he calls the “undisputed flag carrier of the United States.” He argues that airlines are not commodities and that greater scale could benefit customers, but acknowledges a fundamental obstacle to consolidation: “We can’t get it done without a willing partner, and we don’t have one.”

In this episode of The CEO Signal, Kirby discusses the decade-long push to transform United and how he thinks about the bets required to do it. A former card counter who says senior executives should play high-stakes poker with their own money, Kirby warns against assuming the answer is in the spreadsheet. “The important thing,” he says, is to understand and question the assumptions.

Hosted by Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the conversation also looks back at United’s aircraft strategy during Covid. As competitors retired widebody aircraft and shrank their fleets, United moved in the opposite direction. Kirby believed the risk-reward had shifted: “We don’t actually have to be totally right,” he told the board. “We just have to not be totally wrong.” Kirby also explains why building employee pride means eliminating the things employees have to apologize for, and why a CEO’s job is “not to work hard. It’s to think hard.”

The CEO Signal is Semafor's interview platform for conversations with the global CEOs whose decisions are shaping the future of the new world economy. Hosted by Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the show explores the moments of judgment that define leadership.

Penny Pritzker is the founder and chairman of PSP Partners and served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 2013 to 2017.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is CEO Editor at Semafor and a former Financial Times journalist who has spent decades covering global companies and corporate leadership.