Mary Barra

Few CEOs have navigated as many simultaneous headwinds as Mary Barra over the past year. The longest-tenured leader among Detroit’s Big Three faced the end of federal EV tax credits amid President Trump’s push to loosen fuel-economy rules and about $3 billion in tariff-related costs. Yet the GM CEO still delivered $185 billion in revenue and posted the automaker’s highest full-year U.S. market share in a decade. Her response to the tariff environment was characteristically methodical: investing $4 billion in U.S. manufacturing; planning the relocation of production of the Chevrolet Blazer and Equinox from Mexico to domestic plants; and implementing roughly $2 billion in cost reductions. While GM’s pullback from EVs amid lower demand dominated headlines, it still sold nearly 170,000 electric vehicles in the U.S. in 2025, a 48% year-over-year increase, and remains the second-largest EV seller in the country behind Tesla. Barra still calls EVs the “endgame” for GM and for American drivers. Twelve years in as CEO and four years away from 50 at the automaker, she’s thinking not in quarters, but in decades.