In his corner office at Corning Inc.’s towering steel-and-glass headquarters in Corning, N.Y., CEO Wendell Weeks keeps a small, yellowed piece of paper in a dark wood frame behind his desk. Dated Nov. 17, 1880, it’s Thomas Edison’s $311.97 order for Corning Glass Works to produce the glass for a risky new invention of his: the lightbulb.
“I keep that to always remind me: If someone comes to you with an idea that seems small, but there’s a way to make the world just a little bit better, say yes,” Weeks says. “A lot of ideas won’t work, but the ones that do, those are really good.”
The 173-year-old glass company has proved this concept again and again. The creator of iconic kitchen brands such as Pyrex and CorningWare also developed the glass for telescopes, the earliest TV picture tubes, and heat-resistant glass windows for spacecraft. It answered the call of Apple’s Steve Jobs to create Gorilla Glass—that touch-sensitive, hard-to-shatter glass encasing your smartphone. And it created the fiber-optic cables connecting much of the internet—and those now powering the AI revolution.
Those innovations help explain why the CEO of a company in upstate New York with just $13 billion in 2023 revenue has the admiration and friendship of some of the biggest names in business, from Silicon Valley tycoons such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Motor City moguls like Ford’s Jim Farley. Jony Ive, Apple’s former head of design, says there are few collaborators he holds in higher regard—high praise from the man who crafted the industry-shifting iPhone. “As a designer, as a creative, it’s a complete honor to work with somebody like Wendell,” Ive says. “He is utterly consumed by trying to work with you to solve difficult, sometimes almost seemingly impossible challenges.”
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But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the 6-foot-7, 65-year-old Corning CEO. In the 1990s, Weeks was the Corning vice president tapped to run a new optical fiber business to power the burgeoning internet—an innovation that drove Corning’s valuation to nearly $100 billion at the height of the internet bubble in 2000.
That bubble burst the following year, sending the company’s stock price plummeting from some $100 to $1. But Weeks proved his mettle by remaining committed to the enterprise after the dotcom crash. Even when Corning lost 99% of its value and had to lay off half its employees, Weeks insisted on the soundness of the strategy and continued to develop the company’s fiber tech.
He recalls begging company leadership not to fire him and instead let him stay on to clean up the mess: “I said, ‘I’m chaining myself to the wheel here. I’ll be a janitor or whatever it is, but I’m staying until this gets fixed.’ They said, ‘Well, it’s not going to be a janitor. We’d like you to become president.’”
Since then, Corning’s big bet on optical fiber has paid off, and it now accounts for 30% of the company’s revenue. Thanks to the rise of AI, tech giants such as Microsoft are flocking to Corning’s new and improved optical fibers to support hyperscale data centers and generative AI, which require far more fiber than has been used in the past, at much higher speed capabilities.
With a market cap of $41 billion, Corning’s stock price has increased some 50% since January. In October, the company announced a $1 billion multiyear deal with AT&T to provide this next-generation fiber, and Weeks has set a target of adding more than $3 billion in annual sales over the next three years. “We were right that ultimately there’d be a lot more fiber required,” Weeks says, laughing. “We were just off by a decade or two.”
The company’s ordeal at the turn of this century forged Weeks’ leadership style, observed Amazon founder Bezos, who met and befriended the Corning CEO when he joined Amazon’s board in 2016. “My gut is that Wendell was greatly shaped by Corning’s near-death experience,” Bezos tells Fortune. “And it has made him a much better leader.”
Weeks joined Corning 132 years into the company’s 173-year history. Founded in 1851 by a merchant named Amory Houghton Sr., it began as the Bay State Glass Co., a small company in Massachusetts. Houghton moved it a few years later to Brooklyn before settling upstate in Corning in 1868 and changing the company’s name to match the town’s. The company spun off the Pyrex and CorningWare businesses in 1998, but the names and tech they’ve created remain. The Houghton family took the company public in 1945 and sold its controlling stake in 2005.
Weeks’ path to becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company wasn’t a straight line. He was born in Scranton, Pa., where his father was a plumber and his mother a secretary at the local elementary school. Neither went to college, and both were alcoholics, he says.
Looking for a way out of the chaos, Weeks enrolled at Lehigh University, studying finance and accounting, he says, because his “dad went bankrupt, and I wanted to make sure I always understood financial stuff, even though I wasn’t particularly adept at it.” After graduating in 1981, Weeks started as an auditor at the firm Price Waterhouse, where Corning was a client. He soon realized that the people he was interacting with at Corning were exactly the type of people he wanted to be—stable, committed, kind, and family-oriented. In 1983 he was hired as a controller at Corning, where he took on the painful job of helping to shut down an old factory and restructure the industrial business. In his own words: “I much prefer hiring people versus firing them.”
Lauren Petracca for Fortune
After a short detour to Harvard for business school, Weeks came back to Corning in 1987 to develop a strategy for specialty glass and ceramics, studying science textbooks in his off hours to gain the technical knowledge the job required. He was appointed CEO in 2005 and chairman of the board in 2007.
Weeks never received a degree in the sciences, but in his time at Corning, he has earned 44 U.S. patents in his own name. These include patents for Valor Glass Vials–the crack-resistant vials that played a key role in enabling the delivery of COVID vaccines—and for the bendable glass used in interior automotive displays.
Weeks’ approach to problem-solving is what sets him apart, says Samsung executive chairman Jay Y. Lee, who developed a close friendship with Weeks thanks to the tech giant’s more than 50-year partnership with Corning, which has made LCD monitors and foldable smartphone glass, among other inventions, for the company.
Courtesy of Corning
“He doesn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves and work alongside his colleagues when there’s a complex problem to solve or a tough issue to be faced,” Lee says via email. “He inspires everyone to bring their best game to the table in the search for the best solutions.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says he relies upon Weeks for directness and fresh perspectives. “He tells it to you straight,” Jassy tells Fortune. “I’ve had many instances over the years where I’ve called Wendell for input and advice, and where I started a conversation was very different from where I ended up.”
Former Corning CFO Jim Flaws, who was by Weeks’s side during the dotcom disaster, sees in Weeks a kind of “you broke it, you fix it” mentality. He tells a story to illustrate: The office dress code was very casual at that time, but to show their dedication to righting the company in the wake of the crash, Flaws and Weeks vowed to wear suits and ties every day until the company was successful again. “We were going to show the seriousness of this,” Flaws said. (Weeks still wears a suit and tie daily, though the company’s dress code has remained more casual.)
That’s one of Bezos’s favorite anecdotes about Weeks too. “It was a very deliberate, internal thing to say, ‘We are going back to the basics. We are going back to the future. We are returning to our roots,’” Bezos says. “We are not a startup in Silicon Valley. We are an important, 100-plus-year-old company. We are innovative, but buttoned-down too.”
After the massive hit the company took when the dotcom bubble burst, Weeks and Flaws made three big bets in 2002 that are still paying off today: They doubled the amount of money Corning was pouring into research and development. They invested in developing LCD, flat-screen TV displays. And they created new ceramic filters to trap smog and exhaust from trucks.
Five years later, they got their next big break. In 2007, Apple founder Steve Jobs cold-called Weeks after being introduced briefly by a mutual friend. Jobs explained he was creating a new type of cell phone, called the iPhone, where the whole front face would be a display. He was having trouble finding glass to cover it that wouldn’t easily break or scratch. Jobs asked if Corning could make a super-resilient glass–and deliver it in under six months. The Corning board balked, but the CEO pushed ahead anyway—and pulled it off.
Gorilla Glass, the glass still used on the screen of the iPhone and almost every smartphone in the world, was one of the most consequential inventions in modern history. Without it, the smartphone revolution would not have been possible.
“Back then, we thought in total we’d sell maybe $50 million worth of product to the iPhone,” Weeks says. “Steve didn’t actually think it was going to be that big either.” Since then, Gorilla Glass has generated more than $20 billion in revenue for the company, and is used globally on more than 8 billion devices made by Apple and other companies.
Lauren Petracca for Fortune
Now, with its buzziest innovation nearly two decades old, Corning is pivoting yet again, this time to build the “pipes” for the rise of generative AI.
In 1970, the company created optical fiber, a highly pure optical glass, as thin as a strand of human hair, that could transmit light signals over long distances. Prior to that, copper was the dominant cable material—and it’s still used today to power the internet for many households. Today, if you stream a movie, post to a social network, or pose a question to a generative AI application on your mobile phone, you’re able to do so because of optical fiber connectivity in a data center.
Earlier this year, Corning rolled out its “next-generation optical cable,” and it inked a multimillion-dollar deal with Lumen Technologies to reserve 10% of Corning’s global fiber capacity for each of the next two years to power data centers for customers like Microsoft.
How are these fibers different from the ones Corning has produced in the past? It all comes down to density. Gen AI requires 10 times the fiber currently used, but needs to fit in the same space, Weeks says. These new, thinner fibers will allow Lumen and other customers to fit two to four times the amount of fiber into their existing ducts. Unlike copper, fiber has virtually limitless data capacity. In one fiber pair (one sending and one receiving), half of the humans on earth could be talking to the other half simultaneously, Weeks says.
But while there’s a whole lot of fiber out there, the market for it is unlikely to die down anytime soon. “Since we invented fiber, there’s now been enough installed in the world to go back and forth to the sun 20 times,” Weeks says. “And still some 50% of Americans aren’t connected directly by fiber… You think of all that copper cabling that you see—all that ultimately will fall to fiber optics for communications. So we’re still at the beginning of this long-term technology curve.”
Lauren Petracca for Fortune
Corning may have invented the stuff, but it’s not the only player in the market for the original optical fiber now: Weeks is keeping his eye on competitors in Asia, including Japan’s Sumitomo Electric and Furukawa Electric Co. Corning’s new fibers and designs for AI applications are still under patent, however.
The situation shows how essential it is that the company keep breaking new ground. Ford CEO Jim Farley says he has learned more from Weeks than any other CEO. (Corning provides much of the exterior and interior glass for Ford’s vehicles.) “He’s in a thermonuclear war of innovation, and we all know that the IP getting created in places like China, Vietnam, and India and around the world is real,” Farley tells Fortune. “He has to stay in front of it, so constantly fueling the innovation, constantly making the right bet on which innovations, that’s a risk for him.”
William Kerwin, an equity analyst at Morningstar, says the biggest risk he sees ahead for Corning is how capital-intensive its products are to produce—in terms of both manufacturing and research and development. But he thinks Weeks’ three-year, $3 billion sales plan is realistic, thanks to Corning’s diversification.
“It’s a company that is not confined to one product or one market,” Kerwin says. “Glass can sound so boring, but the things they’re able to do with it in terms of durability or the iPhone screens or data-center connectivity with optical fiber is really impressive. They’re really stretching material science to its limits.”
Weeks says he’s betting on gen AI and a trend toward full-screen interior car displays to drive profits going forward. And after decades in the business, he focuses more on finding the right innovation than on predicting the timing of the next blockbuster market for a product.
“If you understand innovation deeply, you understand that getting the timing right is almost impossible,” Weeks says. “You’ve got to be able to instead go to work on s–t that matters early, and then just scale it fast when all of a sudden it ends up you’ve got to be fast. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
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