Solomon (“Sol”) Trujillo is a global telecommunications, media, and cable industry executive born in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
He has served as CEO of large-cap media-communications companies in the US, the European Union, and Asia-Pacific regions. A digital pioneer and long a champion of high-speed broadband to stimulate productivity and advance innovation across all sectors of the economy, Sol is actively engaged in media-comms businesses in both developed and emerging markets, from China and South Asia to North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
After graduating from the University of Wyoming, where he earned a B.S. in Business and an MBA in Finance, he went to work for AT&T. Seven years later, at the age of 32, he became the youngest executive officer in the history of the company.
Following the break-up of the Bell monopoly in 1984, Sol joined US West, one of seven Bell operating companies established by the divestiture. Over the next 15 years, he worked his way up to chairman, CEO, and president of the telecommunications giant, headquartered in Denver. In his capacity as CEO of an enterprise with nearly 30 million customers and more than $14 billion in revenues, Sol was America’s first US-born Hispanic to serve as CEO of a Fortune 200 company.
In 2001, Sol joined the Board of Orange SA, a Paris-based multinational wireless giant with 50 million customers in 19 countries throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Two years later, at the request of France Telecom, a major Orange shareholder, Sol moved to the CEO position to prepare the company for acquisition, becoming the first American to lead a CAC-40 company.
Sol is also experienced in the world of the small business enterprise (SME). In the early 1990′s he established and led the first small business marketing unit of a major telecommunications company. Ten years later, he served as CEO of Graviton, a California development-stage company that was a pioneer in the emerging “sensornetics” industry.
Sol served most recently as CEO of Telstra Corporation, Australia’s largest media-communications enterprise, where he completed the privatization of a previously government-owned monopoly and led the transformation of a traditional telecommunications utility into an integrated media-communications company – including telephone, CATV, wireless, directories, advertising, online trading, and the world’s largest, fastest, and most advanced mobile internet.
He has been a trade policy advisor to the Clinton and the second Bush administrations, trustee of Boston College, and currently serves on the advisory board of UCLA’s School of Public Policy and the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a California-based think tank that addresses Latino issues in North America. Sol has also served as a commissioner on the Colorado Commission of Higher Education and on the boards of business groups and state and regional economic development groups in the western states of the US.
