ANYBODY LISTENING?

SiriusXM launched its first satellite in 2000, with the sci-fi promise of music and talk beamed to your car from space. But the newly independent company and CEO Jennifer Witz now face a very different landscape.

- By Emma Hinchliffe

IN HER HIGH-RISE OFFICE at SiriusXM’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, CEO Jennifer Witz keeps a four-foot-by-three-foot collage of concert tickets—featuring the $10.50 stub from her first-ever show, a 1982 performance by Hall and Oates, as well as tickets to a 1993 Simon and Garfunkel show, Metallica’s 2000 spectacle at Giants Stadium, and a 2010 Paul McCartney concert to celebrate SiriusXM reaching 20 million subscribers.

Music was what drew Witz in 2002 to a position in finance at Sirius, the then-new satellite radio company. Her first job had been in banking, working for garbage and hazardous-waste clients. “I decided I had to find my way in to be around music,” Witz says. More than two decades later, Witz, 56, became the CEO of a sprawling audio entertainment business, one that includes music, yes, but also news, sports, podcasts, and an advertising business. She also must navigate some areas even further from the music world—like the impact of new-car sales, road safety regulations, and satellite launches into space.

SiriusXM—originally designed to be a techy upgrade to car radio listening, without the commercials and service gaps—is now an $8.7-billion-in-revenue Fortune 500 company for the first time, after spinning off from Liberty Media in late 2024. Yet despite its status as a home for some of the most popular entertainers in America and a remarkably healthy, high-free-cash-flow business model admired by the likes of 35% shareholder Berkshire Hathaway, it stares down several existential risks: competition from on-demand streaming audio; a declining and aging subscriber base; and, years beyond that, a world where its core domain—the car—is self-driving, a place for passengers to not just listen to audio but watch its competitors, TV and video.