Where is the Hyperloop? Where is the Cybertruck? Where's full self driving? Every single one of these is years behind the CEO's own formally stated launch dates. So who's really in charge?
It's not at all surprising that he'd install himself as interim CEO at Twitter, as it's easier to make it look like he's getting things done. Especially as he gets to play to his base of fans about 'free speech'. No word on how this is impacted by Prince Alwaleeed Bin Talal's share of the takeover, or that of the emirate of Qatar.
Meanwhile the model 3 and Y dominate world EV sales, and the reusable boosters have become a boring part of weekly life.
I'm not sure I would interpret Elons aspirational predictions as lack of involvement. It isn't unusual to publicly push for the impossible in the hopes you get close to it. Coaches and managers all do this.
In any case, coaches that make these kinds of announcements several times and fail to achieve them, do not stay in the job very long. In Musk's case, this is immaterial as he has rigged the Tesla board with loyalists and family members.
He promised a lot and the team delivered part of it.
People are making investments based on him saying that he’ll have mass production of a personal robot in a few years. If that robot can’t water the plants in my house, then his recent demo was a lie.
I’m not wanting to pull him down, but Tesla is over valued and a potential house of cards. Having more realistic targets means it’s easier to beat expectations.
They are the top two models, but they don’t dominate the market: BYD sells more EVs (mix of PHEVs and BEVs) than Tesla, but makes mamy more models. Tesla’s models “dominate” the EV market no more than Apple’s have historically “dominated” the desktop PC market.
There is a reason Enphase's stock is on a tear.
Sure, the technology is great, but Power Wall sales are Tesla's "deals to lose", and their sales team is aggressively losing them.
I think though Musk seems overextended. The last two firms don't seem terribly important or difficult, but it would really be sad to see Starship fail because of problems at Twitter. If Tesla goes down, the electric car revolution is underway, but if SpaceX goes down Northrup Grumman and Boeing will have no difficulty building rockets to nowhere for a long, long, long, long time.
The real question is whether someone can be CEO of 5 companies and do a good job.
Personally, I think Musk is much better at being a brand than a CEO. But you can hide a lot behind smoke and mirrors if you're the richest person in the world and other rich people will throw money at you just to be your friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE
I think Carmack would call him out (Elon) if he thought less of him. Carmack seems honest to a fault.
I don't think "smoke and mirrors" is justified.
He may be a “true engineer” but I don’t think a particularly genius one at that.
When it comes to Carmack's comments on large scale businesses he says a number of things nowadays that one might consider one step away from PR talk (or business diplomacy). Such statements from him might not come from a place of dishonesty, but he certainly is not "honest to a fault" either nowadays. [1]
[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1348691869971185667
In corporate culture there's this thought that being good at something makes you good at managing people who do that thing. But that's not true. Being an engineer and a manager of engineers requires different skill sets. And being a CEO is many levels divorced from a manager of engineers.
Elon as an engineer or coder stopped being relevant after Paypal. Now it's about Elon the executive. Which, as an outside observer, seems more to be about Elon's brand than any actual managerial genius.
Cool. Then he should be an engineer.
But he's not. He's a CEO. Ostensibly.
And--and I really shouldn't have to say this--those are not the same job. So even if I buy that Musk is a "true engineer" (which I don't, by the way), that doesn't make him de facto a good CEO. In fact, it could just as easily be a liability.
Well wouldn't you know, one of the employees at one of their 25-person companies is an executive assistant! Guess which one actually shows up more than 15 hours a week, the CEO or the "assistant"? Repeat for all other roles they "perform" that aren't expected to be very, very part-time anyway. Or if they do show up something resembling full-time they're on the phone most of the day sorting out personal stuff or dealing with their other ventures.
The answer in ~all cases like this is they don't do half as much (at any given job) as people used to working 40 hours for a living might expect them to.
-Twitter is what he is doing now actively.
-I'm not sure he is doing anything in the Boring Company.
-Neuralink is like an R&D outfit, what does he even need to do there beyond hiring engineers?
-No idea about SpaceX.
Also, he can be the CEO of 5 companies because only one of them is public. If you think it is too much, you can show up to the TSLA shareholder meeting and vote him out, especially since he did not protect himself with dual class shares.
TL;DR: Gwynne Shotwell runs SpaceX.
In my eyes, just like with engineering managers and devs, the strength of an impactful CEO is in collaborating with and enabling their direct reports to deliver great results. It takes two to tango.
I am sure in the case of Elon, there are de facto CEOs (and other leaders) at each of his orgs who effectively do the day to day management and report into Elon.
another example: everyone knows the Walmart family; I'd guess 99 out of 100 people would not be able to name the Walmart CEO.
I can confirm this; I mentioned him by name to three executives and half dozen middle managers / ICs in a meeting about AWS and nobody had a clue.
It doesn't really matter how distracted he is though Tesla investors would be crazy to want him out, he is the reason for Tesla's valuation being so much larger than the rest of the automobile industry combined. Without him there would be a lot less reason for people to believe in it, another CEO would probably be much more sober minded and unable retain investor faith by just escalating rosy predictions and announcements of future successes after each setback
Your point stands of course - Musk's attention must be growing increasingly divided with all of these ventures, you'd think he'd run out of cycles even to delegate work.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-ceo-is-made-up-tit...
- Employ direct reports who are very competent
- Pay them well
- Give them a steer (usually "feed me / make more money)
- Repeat
Companies are just fiefdoms and 'CEO' or any other title the lord gives themselves is just that. Like Kings ruled over country, or countries, the quantity does not matter at scale. Yeah as such 1 king, sorry, 1 CEO couldn't rule over 1000 companies that were each 1 person working - that would be 1000 people reporting and asking questions of 1 person. But at scale, the people at Tesla, etc, don't report to Musk.
If anything, at the scale these companies are at a CEO is worth their connections and as one of the handful of men considered "Richest people in the world" he has access to anyone at anytime, it seems. He has access to any and all resources. So if there is a problem at any one of these companies that cannot be solved by the entire company beneath him, then Musk most likely has the access to solve it - but these issues are few and far between, realistically.
At worst, he fills his time by inserting himself into problems that he's not capable of solving (looking at you hyperloop) and at best, he spends his days chillin responding to emails, attending fancy lunches and dinners, and attending boring meetings.
Steve Jobs owned Pixar while CEO of Apple, but Jobs did not participate much in the day to day operations of Pixar, leaving that to people like Edwin Catmull. He was fully focused on Apple.
Richard Branson is a good example of someone who "ran" multiple companies but in reality was more of a PR genius who got lots of free advertising for his brand. However Branson was always smiling and positive, didn't annoy people the way Musk has started to do recently.
In both cases there is tons of leverage involved. The stripper levered up using home equity to buy new apartments, whereas Musk is using political climate.
The functional companies are relying on political climate as leverage.
Tesla= Political will to do something about climate change
SpaceX= Political will to do something in space for dick measuring contest purposes
The Boring Company= hype fueled scam
Neuralink = hype fueled scam
Twitter just seems to be getting some attention as a recent project and will be hands-on till the actual doers are in the right places.
If you are not tasked with raising capital and hiring people, I am guessing you can be CEO in many more places. :)
I'm sure many CEOs are spending a lot of time keeping things going..
I think a few (in smaller orgs) are doing busywork because they quite frankly don't know why they get so much money when the org has pretty much taken care of itself from before they came onboard..
Execution falls on other executives and their orgs. If the exec team is good, it's not a hands on job unless shit hits the fan at a huge level.
I keep getting flashbacks to the frontpage of HN in the months after Zuck's acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp. It was overwhelmingly flooded with posts and replies, all in consensus, and all in a very similar vein to what I see now with Elon's acquisition of Twitter. A few years later, both of those acquisitions (insta+whatsapp) were near-universally accepted as successful and forward-looking for the time.
Mind you, I am not using this example as an evidence of the Twitter acquisition turning out well. It totally can turn out terrible. We will have to wait and see. The point I am trying to make is that all these current speculations on the future of Twitter are more similar to astrology rather than anything substantial.
Even for a developer, various people can be wildly differing in productivity, by order or more of magnitude.
When you become high level manager it is some of your key decisions that will decide how successful you (your company) are.
Those decisions do require preparatory work, but here people can really be on completely different levels. If you do it well, you can get the information fast, ask questions fast, make decisions fast, delegate the work and set up systems to get notified if something isn't working smoothly. Finding trusted people to delegate to is paramount.
It is not like Elon Musk is doing all this job himself. He decides what he wants to do himself, what is important at the moment and what can be delegated. If you are able to find trusted people to delegate stuff to and you can devour knowledge (as Musk is known to be able to do) I think there is not a huge issue in being CEO of multiple companies other than shareholders being a bit concerned that if stuff will blow up he may not be able to put multiple fires at the same time.
Also, he is a very exceptional talent. He wants to know everything about the stuff his companies do in detail. By this, mostly in beginning, he lays a good base of knowledge and thus enables himself to understand the problems more faster.
The other thing is, he's working around the clock. He likes to and just do. That makes him different from us, who thinks money falls from above even when we're off to work free weekend :)
Just like my dad. Worked for 40 years 17/7. Sometimes 3 days in a row without sleeping. "You have to deliver when it's needed." (programming)
I like Musk because of this. And, I think, I would do it better ;)
@elon: I have a proposal how to extend the range of your cars
And @musk pls don't care about the slowdowners and the guys from yesterday, I still can help you with the range.
