For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were private.
I've never known Jeff to hobnob with celebrities, travel in luxury or abandon his company. I'm not sure he's a "celebrity CEO" as much as he just became a public one, although I don't know him personally.
(FWIW, this is the reason I'd never want to go public. I personally don't like the system, but that doesn't mean it's not how the system works.)
Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive.
We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.
I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about company culture. He built one of the defining dev cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've grown, but I've always found the people and offices of Twilio to be warm, productive and smart.
And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money ever... 2008. If anyone knows how hard it is to build in a climate without easy money, it would be Jeff.
At google Eric had very little to do with product and engineering. He was still a very effective CEO.
His customers probably expected better products, whereas his developers expected another round of amazing perks and fun work.
Is it?
From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco? Amex? Visa?
I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And as OP suggests, it could even be a detriment.
You can level a lot of criticism at Jeff but I don't think this one applies.
I did reword my comment though, because I don't agree Jeff is a "celebrity" as much as a "public" CEO.
If that's the case, the top layers of the system have space for so many CEOs. Some won't even care to be there, they'll just do their job and take the salary plus bonuses.
Jobs certainly was a celebrity CEO, and despite all the criticism of him, I've never once heard anyone imply he was bad for Apple (or its shareholders). Musk is a celebrity CEO, much to the detriment (and potentially benefit? who knows) of his companies.
The CEO’s job is to create value. The answer to your question is “it depends”.
If buyers of their services are impressed with his ability to live code and that moves the needle on results, then yes. If the same can be accomplished by having a non-CEO developer evangelist, then probably no.
Without googling, can you tell me the name of the CEO of Target? Sony? Texas Instruments? BMW? FedEx? Mitsubishi? Exxon? Home Depot? Siemens? Procter & Gamble? 3M? Nestle? Broadcom?
I certainly can't.
But I bet you can tell me who the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon are.
Just because whoever-is-in-charge-of-siemens hasn't run a vanity PR campaign to raise their personal profile, doesn't mean it would help the company if they did.
# Market caps:
Target 64.99B
Sony ~116B (I think)
TI 152B
BMW ~70B
Fedex 62B
Mitsubishi ~70B
Exxon 396B
Home Depot 343B
Siemens 141B
P&G 349B
3M 60B
Nestle ~290B
Broadcom 501B
...
Amazon 1520B
Tesla 750B
The sum of the market cap of the first group of companies is ~2.068T USD, while the sum of the second group is ~2.270T.
And of course the CEO of Tesla is(?) allegedly the richest man in the world, which is one of the reasons why people know him. And I honestly don't remember the name of the CEO of Amazon since Jeff Bezos stepped down.
I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla.
edit: Tesla did 4.2% of total market in 2023, outpacing VW, Subaru and BMW. They did 25% more sales in 2023 than 2022. They sell 500-700k/yr right now with 2023 being 660k. BMW delivered 550k cars worldwide.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-2023-u-s-market-share-volksw...
No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.
