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It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it

It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO. It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for. The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.

dbbk 3y ago
Yeah, it basically means that at any moment he can decide to momentarily be the CEO again and overrule her.
- justrealist 3y ago
  But in reality any CEO is at the whim of the board, and if Elon owns > 51% of the voting shares, that's true no matter who holds any nominal title.
  - karpierz 3y ago
    The difference is that normally, the CEO answers to the board every few months. And the board doesn't tell the CEO what to do; the point of a CEO is that they can be trusted to do the right move. If they can't, then they serve no purpose and will be fired. In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Easier to sell if you’re CEO (in title, if not in actual job) than VP of Sales though. If the issue is the advertisers need someone to escalate too (and someone who Elon would listen to when he needs talking out of some half baked idea), then it is a good fit. If the idea is to have Twitter actually functional as a product driven engineering company, then yeah that won’t work. But baby steps.
      - jacobr1 3y ago
        > VP of Sales though They all want to be CROs (Chief Revenue Officer) now.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    The complexity with the Executive Chairman -> CEO -> CTO sandwich is that Elon also has a day-to-day operating role at the company. That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes. This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
      - nostrademons 3y ago
        With Musk in the CTO role, he's either going to be there every day, or Twitter is going to have an absent CTO. Both of them are bad for decision-making efficiency.
  - waffle_ss 3y ago
    There is no board of directors. Twitter isn't a publicly-traded company any more; it's private and it's owned by Musk.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Private companies still have boards of directors. It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity; even non-profits and pre-funding startups will usually have a board with more than one person.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity It is actually extremely common for corporations which aren’t regular business as such - for example, trustees of family trusts are commonly corporations with a single director who is the person who ultimately controls the trust. Also a common structure for sole proprietorship businesses that want some protection from legal liability. I own a company which never has done anything (I was daydreaming). Its board of directors has one member-me. Legally, I am required to hold annual board meetings with myself, although I believe the legal obligation is met if I hold them in my head. “This year’s financial results: zero revenue, zero expenses, zero assets, zero liabilities, zero employees-another great year at does-nothing-corp!”
        lazide 3y ago
        Meetings - yes, but still a good idea to write down minutes (seriously). It’s important documentation if you want the legal shield. Otherwise, it’s easier to pierce the veil. I once worked for a small Corp that the office manager was the board secretary and literally had a meeting with just herself for such a purpose.
        skissane 3y ago
        Minutes would be important if my company actually did anything. A company that literally does nothing doesn’t have to worry about the piercing of the corporate veil, because you first need to do something before you can become liable for it
- mjfl 3y ago
  he paid $44 billion to own the company
  - peanuty1 3y ago
    He and a group of other investors including a16z, Binance, and Sequoia.
atonse 3y ago
Yes! How could I forget one of my favorite examples, Eric Schmidt at google. It was a brilliant move. But you have a great point about CEO vs COO. As the technical CEO of a small company myself (who loves building things), I know you just have to deal with certain things directly and dedicate your name and time (not complaining, that's just the job) and that takes time away from the day to day building.
miohtama 3y ago
Eric’s position was “golden handcuffs” from investors. Musk’s case is a bit different.
skissane 3y ago
Oracle has had Larry Ellison as chairman/CTO, and someone else as CEO, for almost 10 years now - and they’ve done well (financially at least) over the period. They even started out with two joint CEOs (Mark Hurd and Safra Catz), but were reduced to one by Mark Hurd’s sudden untimely death. Ellison isn’t majority owner, but he does own over a third of the stock.
- b112 3y ago
  Oracle, what a crazy company. Its only goal seems to be to buy things, and then destroy them. I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit. But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
  - skissane 3y ago
    I worked for Oracle for almost 10 years. My memories of working there is of just a lot of totally normal everyday people doing the same things as at any other large corporation. Some of the business and technical decisions were disappointing, yet somehow they found a way to just keep on making boatloads of money anyway.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Oracle isn't exactly a shining example. If you ask anyone technical who professionally came of age in the last 25 years what they're known for, the answer will be "lawsuits". Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business. Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
johannes1234321 3y ago
It's the model his friend Larry Ellison uses with Oracle.
phkahler 3y ago
Yeah, imagine having to trust each other?
easytiger 3y ago
> It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO. That's a good description and it is the de facto structure of a great many companies I've worked in/with. I would say it's relatively normal to be honest

dbbk 3y ago

Yeah, it basically means that at any moment he can decide to momentarily be the CEO again and overrule her.

justrealist 3y ago
But in reality any CEO is at the whim of the board, and if Elon owns > 51% of the voting shares, that's true no matter who holds any nominal title.
- karpierz 3y ago
  The difference is that normally, the CEO answers to the board every few months. And the board doesn't tell the CEO what to do; the point of a CEO is that they can be trusted to do the right move. If they can't, then they serve no purpose and will be fired. In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Easier to sell if you’re CEO (in title, if not in actual job) than VP of Sales though. If the issue is the advertisers need someone to escalate too (and someone who Elon would listen to when he needs talking out of some half baked idea), then it is a good fit. If the idea is to have Twitter actually functional as a product driven engineering company, then yeah that won’t work. But baby steps.
    - jacobr1 3y ago
      > VP of Sales though They all want to be CROs (Chief Revenue Officer) now.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  The complexity with the Executive Chairman -> CEO -> CTO sandwich is that Elon also has a day-to-day operating role at the company. That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes. This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      With Musk in the CTO role, he's either going to be there every day, or Twitter is going to have an absent CTO. Both of them are bad for decision-making efficiency.
- waffle_ss 3y ago
  There is no board of directors. Twitter isn't a publicly-traded company any more; it's private and it's owned by Musk.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Private companies still have boards of directors. It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity; even non-profits and pre-funding startups will usually have a board with more than one person.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity It is actually extremely common for corporations which aren’t regular business as such - for example, trustees of family trusts are commonly corporations with a single director who is the person who ultimately controls the trust. Also a common structure for sole proprietorship businesses that want some protection from legal liability. I own a company which never has done anything (I was daydreaming). Its board of directors has one member-me. Legally, I am required to hold annual board meetings with myself, although I believe the legal obligation is met if I hold them in my head. “This year’s financial results: zero revenue, zero expenses, zero assets, zero liabilities, zero employees-another great year at does-nothing-corp!”
      - lazide 3y ago
        Meetings - yes, but still a good idea to write down minutes (seriously). It’s important documentation if you want the legal shield. Otherwise, it’s easier to pierce the veil. I once worked for a small Corp that the office manager was the board secretary and literally had a meeting with just herself for such a purpose.
        skissane 3y ago
        Minutes would be important if my company actually did anything. A company that literally does nothing doesn’t have to worry about the piercing of the corporate veil, because you first need to do something before you can become liable for it
mjfl 3y ago
he paid $44 billion to own the company
- peanuty1 3y ago
  He and a group of other investors including a16z, Binance, and Sequoia.

atonse 3y ago

Yes! How could I forget one of my favorite examples, Eric Schmidt at google. It was a brilliant move. But you have a great point about CEO vs COO. As the technical CEO of a small company myself (who loves building things), I know you just have to deal with certain things directly and dedicate your name and time (not complaining, that's just the job) and that takes time away from the day to day building.

miohtama 3y ago

Eric’s position was “golden handcuffs” from investors. Musk’s case is a bit different.

skissane 3y ago

Oracle has had Larry Ellison as chairman/CTO, and someone else as CEO, for almost 10 years now - and they’ve done well (financially at least) over the period. They even started out with two joint CEOs (Mark Hurd and Safra Catz), but were reduced to one by Mark Hurd’s sudden untimely death. Ellison isn’t majority owner, but he does own over a third of the stock.

b112 3y ago
Oracle, what a crazy company. Its only goal seems to be to buy things, and then destroy them. I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit. But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
- skissane 3y ago
  I worked for Oracle for almost 10 years. My memories of working there is of just a lot of totally normal everyday people doing the same things as at any other large corporation. Some of the business and technical decisions were disappointing, yet somehow they found a way to just keep on making boatloads of money anyway.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Oracle isn't exactly a shining example. If you ask anyone technical who professionally came of age in the last 25 years what they're known for, the answer will be "lawsuits". Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business. Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.

johannes1234321 3y ago

It's the model his friend Larry Ellison uses with Oracle.

phkahler 3y ago

Yeah, imagine having to trust each other?

easytiger 3y ago

> It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO. That's a good description and it is the de facto structure of a great many companies I've worked in/with. I would say it's relatively normal to be honest