Roger Lynch leaves Condé Nast for Mattel: chairman 2 Oct, CEO by 2 Nov; Mike Perlis interim
Roger Lynch told Condé Nast staff on 30 September that after seven and a half years as chief executive he is stepping down to run Mattel, the toymaker behind Barbie and the 2023 Barbie film. His memo opened with the words bittersweet news. Mattel's board, which he has sat on since 2018 as lead independent director, makes him chairman on 2 October and chief executive by 2 November; Ynon Kreiz leaves the same day for a senior post at another public company, and Diana Ferguson becomes Mattel's lead independent director. At Condé Nast the interim is Mike Perlis, who ran Forbes Media from 2010 to 2017 and before that Ziff Davis, with a decade at SoftBank Capital in between. Lynch, who came from Pandora and before that founded Sling TV, arrived in April 2019 and in 2020 folded the American and international editions into one structure with Anna Wintour as worldwide chief content officer, a job she kept when she stepped down as Vogue's editor in June 2025. The publisher's web traffic has fallen as AI chatbots answer the questions readers once brought to its sites, which is the market the next chief executive inherits.