6 ms·

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.