Musk isn't just a CEO. He's their Steve Jobs -- co-founder and visionary. He's chief product architect. And he's also the money. I think he deserves the right to have a CEO-centric view of his company.
Musk being CEO is not really like a startup founder being CEO. For example at SpaceX the company is basically run by Gwynne Shotwell, with Elon being the visionary and face of the company, with the clout and authority to dive deep into any part of the company he thinks is important right now and help facilitate or micro-manage stuff. But when he is occupied elsewhere for a couple months the gears keep turning without him just fine. I imagine his other companies (with the notable exception of Twitter) work the same.
This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies.
They are different skill sets.
It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla.
Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.
Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).
Tesla would do a lot better if they had a world-class industrial CEO like Alan Mulally or the equivalent running the show. Tesla needs their Gwynne Shotwell. Musk should focus on product, technology, evangelizing, etc. Tesla needs more Tim Cook right now, pushing manufacturing efficiencies and process perfection, than it needs a Steve Jobs running the show. There is no great reason Musk needs to be CEO of Tesla, his particular skill is elsewhere.
I think Musk is good at choose great lieutenants who believe in his vision. As a person he has turned into an awful individual. Lots of awful individuals have been great at business and running corps. I don't actually think he's all that talented as a day-to-day CEO
Completely different scenarios, completely different companies. Steve Jobs was never the technical guy, he was more the visionary. He could get away with that, because he had really smart engineers and producing phones and computers is a lot simpler than producing cars. Elon Musk is a genius, but what does he really know about production or getting the cost down for an electric car more than any other CEO of a major auto company? Elon Musk is a visionary, but a visionary for an auto company is not as vital as a visionary for a tech or computer company. They need a guy in tesla who can increase production and lower cost, or sell at a different price point and change target market for their cars. They don't need someone who is going to tweet out a lot of reckless things while hemorrhaging money for the company.
Why does it have to be the current version of Musk to be a better version of Musk? Why can't we consider that Musk or his type was instrumental to launch Tesla but at this point a different person is better fit to grow it? Maybe skills needed to sustain a company might be different than the skills needed to launch it.
You're probably thinking of SpaceX. While it's not Tesla, it is another multi-billion dollar company pioneering an industry so I can see how you might get them confused.
Musk is eccentric sure, but at the end of the day the two companies are building emmission-free vehicles and trying to make humanity an interplanetary species. Both of these are pretty worth-while goals, imho.
Keep in mind a lot of makers, inventors, etc. are not very good at the CEO job.
It's probably unlikely that Jony Ive (a truly brilliant designer) would have any business trying to run Apple.
James Dyson, a great maker, isn't the CEO of Dyson (and hasn't been since 2001). He's the chief engineer. (see the nice article below that he wrote describing how he had to bring in outside operators once they hit scale [1])
Neither Nikola Tesla nor Edison demonstrated good skill at running businesses. Musk is not a greater maker than those two.
You don't want John Carmack running id Software's day to day operations, nor do you want Shigeru Miyamoto running Nintendo. At that level, you want to aggressively focus on what you're best at.
Even Henry Ford, who was a decently skilled business operator, was still not the best available option for running the day to day operations of his own company at scale. It's crazy hard to run an extremely large business well, and the level of skill it demands is every bit as rare as the maker-type talent.
I happen to agree with this Bloomberg article. What Musk needs is Alan Mulally or the equivalent (a Gwynne Shotwell if you will; an extremely difficult challenge, given the requirement that the person be compatible with Musk):
Quick - name the CEO of Toyota. Can't do it? How about Volkswagen? Still no? These are the two largest car companies in the world.
Honestly, I think Tesla would be better off if Musk were to go away - at this point. Musk really is the perennial entrepreneur. He's a great idea man, and he can get a company built and make that idea come to life. But he can't run a business.
I think Musk has overstayed his welcome at Tesla. He did it - he took EV's from the niche that hardly anybody paid attention to and made them mainstream. Bravo! I never would have thought he could have done it - but he did. Now it's becoming clear it's time for him to step away and tackle another problem. Otherwise he risks interfering with his own success.
And you can be an enterprise CEO and still innovate as a company eg. Apple, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz.
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