How is it possible to be the CEO of 5 companies at the same time?

Musk is a figurehead at both Tesla and SpaceX. He is too far out of the salt mines (or too impatient) to reconcile his wildly optimistic release estimates with actual engineeering reality.

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.

If you've got the right people in place, CEO could be a mostly ceremonial position.

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.

You buy or found them and make yourself CEO.

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.

Each of those companies probably has an actual CEO that goes by "VP of operations" or some similar title. And Musk mostly approves some of their decisions and gives his take.

-Tesla doesn't need his input all that much at the moment. The key strategy is set, now they just need to execute operationally.

-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.

There are plenty of conglomerates who are central companies who own a bunch of functionally distinct companies. Generally, each of these distinct companies have their own CEO and these CEOs will repo into the conglomerate's management structure.

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.

It is strange how the main people running th sr companies are completely unknown and unrecognized. I don’t know if it is coincidental or by design. For most other big tech companies there is usually a lot of guessing by the media of who’s next to lead.

These kinds of CEOs usually have very strong supporting staff. COO, CFO, COS, etc probably doing more day to day than Elon would care to deal with.

He seems very distracted even without owning companies. He tweets as much as DJT used to in peak form, at all hours as well. I don't think he's often very focused to begin with so his companies can clearly cope.

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

Is Wikipedia's Neuralink article out-of-date? It lists Jared Birchall as CEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink

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.

CEO is just a title.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-ceo-is-made-up-tit...

Mostly:

- Employ direct reports who are very competent

- Pay them well

- Give them a steer (usually "feed me / make more money)

- Repeat

I feel a light touch is best. CEOs that run just one company are always changing this and that. They should get out of the way more and let their employees do their work.

If you own 5 companies then you're CEO of 5 companies at the same time.

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.

Jack Dorsey was CEO of both Twitter and Block (formerly Square), but it became pretty obvious to everyone that he was mostly a mascot at Twitter while focusing on Block, and used his Twitter account mainly to promote Bitcoin.

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.

It is possible to claim the official title of CEO and still have others actually perform the tasks traditionally associated with the role.

Being a classic CEO its difficult to run just one company, two is too much.

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 many companies CEO is mostly a salesman and his role is to get as many investment flowing in as possible. So it means they have to be a good actor, dress nicely and go to fund raising parties. Often they are hired just for their name - so investor who knows them, feel more reassured about investing in "their" company.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Based on the amount of tweets he does, I doubt he actually spends time on deep operational stuff at every company. He has got people doing it for him. He does have lot of energy which keeps him going but no one can spend crazy hours on 5 companies at that scale at the same time.

Me thinks Musk is stacking up companies the same way the stripper in "The big short" was stacking houses.

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

I think being CEO for X number of places is more of a directions setting and "visionary" thinking if you have a strong execution layer beneath you.

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. :)

Good talent combined with exceptional skill in making stuff run itself.

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..

CEOs are mostly about vision and culture/values (with financials thrown in for good measure).

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.

All these companies have someone(s) who actually runs them (i.e., the COO at SpaceX), leaving Musk with overall strategy/vision (though he obviously gets deeply involved too at times, at least he did with Tesla for a period.)

From what it sounds like from press coverage of this first week of Elon's Twitter, Elon has a team of trusted advisors who all excel at their particular skills. I assume he passes a lot of executive work down to them.

Given how things are going at Twitter so far, one might rule out the second option. And there's probably investors who are asking themselves this question too.

I think the mistake is assuming that there is any connection between amount of work put in and your productivity as a CEO.

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.

Can't see why not. Musk is so famous and so many people look up to him that he turns brands into gold. Wouldn't be possible for avg no name CEO.

One would need compressed reports and supportive suggestions to some of the reported issues. Also, Musk isn't a one man show. He has the people.

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