I'm deeply skeptical of CEOs being "built different" like some people are arguing here. If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous.
If anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.
> With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.
CEO compensation is determined by board committees mostly made up of other CxOs. They write letters to each other's shareholders about how valuable CEOs are to build up the edifice.
I wish my compensation were determined by fellow engineers who "truly know my worth". I'd pay it forward if I were on a committee determining colleague's pay packets.
Well, be the change you want to see. CEOs know that part of the justification of their existence relies on solidarity between each other - and that they can collectively bargain with institutions to remind of that justification.
I suspect Elon's value proposition now isn't really anything he does, it's the fear for stockholders that their companies will be evaluated like any other company and it will tank the stock if Elon isn't around.
I'd advise you take a look at some of Musk's companies:
- Tesla is the top seller of EVs in the US, beating century-old companies.
- SpaceX has left public institutions like NASA and ESA in the dust despite their vastly bigger budgets
- Although it joined late, xAI is now firmly in the top 4 of AI companies worldwide (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI)
What's the common element between these successes?
Yeah the anti-Elon sentiment on HN seems unique to this platform and maybe reddit. If you go onto any college campus, you'll see a variety of students wearing Tesla or SpaceX merch. Neuralink has a 7 or 8 stage, highly competitive interview process, and most of his companies are internationally recognized and careers with them are highly sought after.
I suspect a lot of people are just upset they got rejected
That Elon Musk let the competent people do their job and didn't meddle too much? Did you know that Cybertruck, Starship and Twitter are the projects where Musk has let his competence "shine" the most?
It's been long-since established that the only reason early Musk companies survived was employees learning how to manage up and manipulate Musk into doing the right things early on...
I'm not OP but that seems like a pretty reasonable assumption. LLM dominance is basically a US thing (Europe is handicapped by the EU and China is handicapped by hardware), and there are only a few companies that are actually competitive in LLM's (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Meta, Anthropic). I think top 5 is a safer bet but top four isn't an unreasonable thing to say confidently
xAI has the largest GPU cluster for AI training in the world, and they regularly produce top-ranking models. Companies like mistral produce clever models but they’re functionally just not on the level of things like Grok
> If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous.
Except, Elon has been largely successful at being the "CEO" of these companies because he attracts talent to them. So...either:
(1) Businesses still will require human talent and if so, I don't see how an AI bot will replace a CEO who is necessary to attract human talent.
OR
(2) Businesses don't require any human talent beneath the CEO and thus a CEO is still necessary, or at least some type of "orchestrator" to direct the AI bots beneath them.
Keep in mind, SpaceX and Tesla are both in industries where people don’t actually have that many other options. If you really want to see what talent Elon is able to attract, you need to look at his other companies like X.
That might be true, but I suspect my point is rather that Elon attracted the initial talent (likely through compensation) and thats what attracts the next level. In the wise words of my Olympian swimmer friend "The only way I could become an Olympic swimmer was by training next to people faster than me".
My experience would lead me to disagree, Elon companies tend to be highly competitive to apply for, and working for one is still quite prestigious among people hiring. If young engineer support means anything their merch is still quite popular among college engineering students
Funny story: I'm friends with a political scientist that sustained themselves through college by writing thesis papers for MBA students. They would research, then buy a two liter energy drink bottle and write it all in one go over the weekend.
It is easy, yes. About the equivalent of two or three A levels for anyone in the UK. However the point is not networking, but understanding large areas of business operation that you don't already know. For people like us, that's generally things like strategy, finance, marketing (which isn't the same thing as advertising), organisational behaviour (effectively applied sociology), HR (the weakest area of the course I took). It's not particularly useful for networking, since the people you meet are at your own level.
A library card etc. are useful, but a very long way from the usefulness of a planned and taught course. And no, I haven't missed the point - you most certainly have. There are useful methods of networking, and they are based on breadth (how many people you meet), depth (how specific your discussions can be) and length of engagement. People from completely different industries whom you meet over coffee in a group exercise are not that, and would not justify the cost of the course. What does justify it is what you learn.
I mean, you're not wrong. The COO, Gwynne Shotwell, at SpaceX, is known to handle a lot of the day to day stuff, and I feel that further reinforces the point. If she can handle all of that in her role as COO then what's the point of a CEO?
A CEO will set the grand vision, long term goals, and direction for the company - typically approved by the board (which the CEO has to convince). The COO literally operates the company, while the CEO will nudge them in certain directions to accomplish broader goals.
> A CEO will set the grand vision, long term goals, and direction for the company
I thought determining vision/goals/direction was the responsibility of the board. The Chief Executive Officer is supposed to execute the board's wishes.
A board is often a consulting group. They're there to see the 30,000ft view of what's going on, areas that need focus, and suggest grand strategy/guidance. A board is usually comprised of executives from other companies. The CEO is usually the one selling the board on their vision and execution. The board acts like guard rails for that vision.
Hot take: Musk is a great CEO. He's a horrible person, but I feel it's undeniable that his weight behind a project greatly increases the chance of interesting and profitable things happening (despite the over-optimistic claims and missed deadlines). I think he achieves this in large part _because_ he is an asshole, tweeting all the time to drum up publicity, being notorious for doing K, being too optimistic about what can be achieved, etc. I think somebody can be a good CEO without being such a jerk, it's just that Musk doesn't take the good-person strategy. And the bad-person strategy works well for him.
A CEO's job is (roughly) to maximize a company's valuation. It is not to run the company themselves, not to be nice, not to improve the world. I'm not claiming this is what _should_ be, just how it _is_. By this metric, I think Musk has done really well in his role.
Edit: Tangentially related -- at the end of the musical "Hadestown", the cast raise their glasses to the audience and toast "to the world we dream about, and the one we live in today." I think about that a lot. It's so beautiful, helps enforce some realism on me, and makes me think about what I want to change with my life.
The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later). It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone. Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
It did, and it needed a direction to be pushed towards. Are you familiar with the great man theory of history [0]? It is no different here (well, historians these days use a blend of great man theory and historical materialism as you're stating in your example, as no one theory explains the majority of historical changes).
> The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later).
I do not want to take credit away from SpaceX in what they achieved. It sure is complex. But it's also possible to give someone excess credit by denying others what is due. I don't know which part of 'reusable rockets' you are talking about, whether it's the reusable engines and hardware or if it's the VTOL technology. But none of that was 'invented' by SpaceX. NASA had been doing that for decades before that, but never had enough funding to get it all together. Talking about reusable hardware and engines, the Space Shuttle Orbiter is an obvious example - the manned upper stage of a rocket that entered orbit and was reused multiple times for decades. SpaceX doesn't yet have an upper stage that has done that. The only starship among the 9 to even survive the reentry never entered orbit in the first place. Now comes the 'reusable engine'. Do you need a better example than the RS-25/SSME of the same orbiter? Now let's talk about VTOL rockets. Wasn't Apollo LMs able to land and takeoff vertically in the 1960s itself? NASA also had a 'Delta Clipper' experiment in the 1990s that did more or less the same thing as SpaceX grasshopper and Starship SN15 - 'propulsive hops', multiple times. Another innovation at SpaceX is the full-flow stage combustion cycle used in the Raptor engine. To date, it is the only FF-SCC engine to have operated in space. But both NASA and USSR had tested these things on the ground. Similarly, Starship's silica heat tiles are entirely of NASA heritage - something they never seem to mention in their live telecasts.
I see people berating NASA while comparing them with SpaceX. How much of a coincidence is it that the technologies used by SpaceX are something under NASA's expertise? The real engineers at SpaceX wouldn't deny those links. Many of them were veterans who worked with NASA to develop them. And that's fine. But it's very uncharitable to not credit NASA at all. The real important question right now is, how many of those veterans are left at SpaceX, improving these things? Meanwhile unlike SpaceX, NASA didn't keep getting government contracts, no matter how many times they failed. NASA would find their funding cut every time they looked like they achieved something.
> It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone.
Two things that cannot be denied about Steve Jobs is that he had an impeccable aesthetic sense and an larger-than-life image needed to market his products. But nothing seen in the iPhone was new even in 2007. Full capacitive touch screens, multi-touch technology, etc were already in the market in some niche devices like PDAs. The technology wasn't advanced enough back then to bring it all together. Steve Jobs had the team and the resources needed to do it for the first times. But he didn't invent any of those. Again, this is not to take away the credit from Jobs for his leadership.
> Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
This is the part I have a problem with. All the work done by the others are just neglected. All the damages done by these people are also neglected. You have no idea how many new ideas from their rivals they drive into oblivion, so as to retain their image. Leaders are a cog in the machine - just like everyone else working with him to generate the value. But this sort of hero worship by neglecting everyone else and their transgressions is a net negative for human race. They aren't some sort of divine magical beings.
Elon doesn't bring huge amounts of time to his companies, he brings some sort of skill which I don't know how to characterize but empirically must exist given the level of repeatable success he's had.
If there was a job description to "throw this football 50 yards into a trash can, a couple of times per week" I wouldn't be able to do the job at all, but an NFL quarterback might be able to do the job for 5 different companies while also Tweeting 50 times a day.
No, it's clearly much more than that. He was able to get Grok to a frontier-level LLM while Apple and Microsoft, with far more money to throw at the problem, and more existentially threatened by not succeeding, have not.
Is there any secret sauce behind LLM other than big money? I'm under the impression that its a known recipe at its core and for many of the enhancements around it.
Maybe, but there is also the potential for survivorship bias being a factor here too. The chance that a specific person with no football skills can throw a football 50 yards into a trash can is pretty low. But if you gather a stadium full of unskilled random people, chances are good that one of them will be able to do so, even multiple times. But you'd be wasting your time trying to discern what special football skill that person has.
I'm not saying this means successful CEOs don't have any relevant skills contributing to their success, but it's worth considering that for the most part we're only seeing the successful ones. It's hard to say how many would-be billionaire CEOs are out there with similar skills to someone like Elon Musk who just happened to get unlucky.
It can tell other people what to do, just like CEO. You know LLM is having the vision and employees will execute. Now where is the multibillion package?
If you can figure out a way to collect and parse information needed to make executive decisions via LLM+tool calls, you would be a billionaire overnight. There’s a reason that it takes a human in these roles and people w/ 0 organizational/executive experience fail to understand just how complex they are.
Who said either was easy or able to be automated currently? I'm talking about actual users of tools trying to automate, not hype-driven investors or journalists. Both programming and executive decision making are hard, don't make the mistake of thinking your job hard or special while others' are easy, it's the same exact thing artists tried to do when Stable Diffusion came out. Turns out, it's all hard.
Their level of expertise, access, relationships, etc all scale with the business. If it’s big, you need someone well connected who can mange an organization of that size. IANAE but I would imagine having access to top schools would be a big factor as well.
if it's so easy, why is spacex 90% of earth launch volume? lol
something is different at elon's companies. My guess is he has autism superpowers of not caring about your feelings and just operating on the facts. Nothing done for show.
Attributing something to luck sounds like a lazy cop out, sorry.
We just had an article on the front page yesterday about “increasing your luck”.
If you need to be lucky in meeting the right people, you can increase your chances by spending your evenings in the your nearest financial district watering hole. We’ve easily established luck can be controlled for, which puts us back into skill territory.
What specifically must one luck out on? Have you tried?
Exactly, as a multimillion lottery winner, it upsets me so much when people say I won because of luck.
I played every single day, and I played at different locations. I also made sure I performed my pre-ticket rituals which I learned from other lottery winners. Other people could have done the same. It’s absolutely a skill issue.
> Attributing something to luck sounds like a lazy cop out, sorry.
Everyone one of us here has an unbroken line of lucky (lucky enough!) ancestors stretching back a billion years or so. Pretending it's not a thing is silly.
When you're born matters. Where you're born matters. Who you encounter matters. etc. etc. etc.
> What specifically must one luck out on? Have you tried?
I think perhaps we have different definitions of luck.
No, I think we have a similar definition of luck, but I think you’ve succumbed to a defeatist attitude. You have to be pretty unlucky to be permanently locked out of becoming a CEO, and if you’re dealt those cards, moaning about it on an online forum would be way down in your list of priorities.
Then why were you bringing up conditions of ones birth?
Vanishingly unlikely to get one if you try, or vanishingly unlikely to get one if you sit on your ass all day?
I assume you’re talking about the former and yet I don’t think you’ve thought this through. I think you’ve blindly attributed to luck what actually requires time, perseverance, grit, lack of morality. The only way to figure that out is for you to offer up your understanding of what one must luck out on?
> Then why were you bringing up conditions of ones birth?
Because they're a form of luck?
If you're born in the developed world, that's luck. If you're born to supportive parents, that's luck. If you're Steve Jobs and you wind up high school buddies with Woz in Mountain View, CA, that's luck. White? Luck. Male? Luck. Healthy? Luck. A light touching of psychopathy? Luck!
> Vanishingly unlikely to get one if you try, or vanishingly unlikely to get one if you sit on your ass all day?
Both.
> I think you’ve blindly attributed to luck what actually requires time, perseverance, grit, lack of morality.
There are many, many people who devote time, perserverance, and grit to their endeavours without becoming a "hugely expensive" CEO. Hence, luck. Is it the only thing? No. Is it a thing? Yes, absolutely.
None of what you’ve mentioned is a requirement to become a “hugely expensive” CEO. If you’re born into conditions which stop you from becoming self reliant, that’s a different story but we covered that.
Those people who devote time - do they devote time to becoming a hugely expensive CEO or just some “endeavours”?
I think we’re fundamentally disagreeing on whether or not lack of luck can be adequately compensated for by exerting more effort. I have not yet heard of a compelling argument for why that’s not the case.
> None of what you’ve mentioned is a requirement to become a “hugely expensive” CEO.
Again, no one said they're requirements. Just significant factors. You don't have to be white, you don't have to be male, you don't have to be from the developed world… but you do have to have some substantially lucky breaks somewhere.
A quadriplegic orphan of the Gaza War might become the next Elon Musk. But the odds are stacked heavily against them.
God save us from grindset influencers who pedal all this ‘if you didn’t succeed it was down to you not trying hard enough’ m’larky. In some respects I appreciate the call to taking agency but the fact it results in people being unable to acknowledge the sheer extent of external factors in the world is crazy.
No one except the article we're all (theoretically) discussing, titled "CEOs are hugely expensive", citing "the boards of BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, Glencore, Flutter Entertainment and the London Stock Exchange" as examples in the introductory paragraph.
Now read the rest of the article. It talks about CEOs in general, not just megacorp ones, even if it does use megacorp CEOs in the intro. It is asking a general question of whether the role of a CEO should be automated. Articles often start with a hook that is related but does not wholly encompass the entirety of the point of the article.
In Errol Musk's political career, he was a city councillor and member of an opposition party. So, while true, this is minor league. His business ventures appear to be more relevant to his wealth.
Just because luck plays a part in everything does not make it moot.
Set up two identical agents in a game with rules guaranteeing a winner, and you will end up with one loser being equal to the winner.
I agree that CEO positions in aggregate are likely generally filled by people better at "CEOing", but there is nothing ruling out "losers" who were equally skilled or even better that just didn't make it due to luck or any of the innumerable factors playing into life.
Because most of the people don't want to. Additionally, there is a limit on positions. Only few people will get there. But it doesn't mean that there was a competition based on abilities, that some extraordinary skills are needed, or that many other people would not be as good.
A CEO can be valuable while still doing nothing with a simple explanation: they are cult figures whose purpose is to increase the stock value. This is obvious in the case of a drug addict like Elon like you describe, but others are increasingly copying the playbook.
If anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.