Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.

Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.

Seems to work for him though...

Seems like it's working though? Why not redefine what a CEO's role is? Just a though here no arguing intended. :)

We're just used to CEOs having only a decorative role, who can be replaced in an instant. So much so that when we see a CEO actually working/engaging with the actual product/service, they seem like a peculiar and rare specimen.

Well he is technically the CTO of SpaceX.

He must mean reviewing designs and prototypes, not actually creating things.

I would not characterize many CEOs as being "a decorative role, who can be replaced in an instant". Leading may not be hands-on engineering and design (at least, you hope!), but it's certainly FAR from decorative.

I would characterize most CEOs I've met(and not only) as decorative. And that's why they do get replaced in an instant.

What exactly does a CEO do?

I haven't spent much time in a corporate environment, mostly in a workshop making structural steel, so it's not at all clear to me who the CxO layer does.

As another comment suggested their roles seem to be mostly decorative. Do these roles actually make decisions, or just sign off on them?

Tesla/SpaceX are not your typical for-profit companies, where CEOs are decorative and all that matters is quarterly reports.

CEO is a role that will vary noticeably from company to company. But in general, the CEO will sign off on a lot of decisions and make a few ones.

Basically, it's like this:

If your subordinates come to you and are like, "This is absolutely the right thing to do," then you'll 95% of the time sign off on it. If you find that that's not true, it's probably time to fire your subordinates, they apparently aren't doing a good job.

If subordinate A comes to you and says, "We should do X," and subordinate B comes to you and says, "We should do mutually exclusive thing Y," then you may need to decide between them.

CEOs should also ideally have a strategic sense and say things like, "Guys, I want us to look at doing something like thing Z. Research it and tell me your conclusions," when everyone else thought that there was no decision to be made at all -- just keep chugging along.

Why not? If he's got the skills necessary to be more deeply involved in the engineering aspects, what else does he have to do that he cannot assign to another C-level exec?

There have been others. Ed Land, of Polaroid, had a private lab next to his office as CEO. But they're rare.

A CEO's job is to delegate responsibilities, and an essential part of delegation is deciding what to delegate, and what to handle yourself. The latter depends on the CEO's passion and skillset, and since engineering and design is where Musk's lies, that is what he focuses on. Most CEOs have humanities or social sciences backgrounds, so they focus on the non-engineering aspects of the business.

A CEO is responsible for execution. Execution of a strategy, declaring a vision, setting the tone of the culture of all the workers, getting all hands working together and delivering value. Understand the market, their future in the market, the direction the company needs to move in, the strengths and weaknesses of themselves (and the company) and design strategies to mitigate weakness and risk.

In that role, maybe they make lots of decisions, maybe they write things like "Part Deux", or maybe they stand around an scream a lot. Whatever works; probably a little of all of the above, and a good CEO knows when to use which approach.

At some level they may also report to a board, who helps them, or replaces them, all based on their execution success. And at another level, they report to shareholders who do the same.

Part of the problem is that a CEO plays a very different role in a three person company, a 300 person company, a 3000 person company, and a 30k person company. I have a very difficult time imagining swapping out the CEO of an early round startup without having a major existential crisis.

A CEO's job is strategy. All these other replies are wrong.

Seems like it's not working, since his companies are hemorrhaging money.

No... sorry but it sounds like you have no idea what a CEO's actual role is.

He's a product/visionary CEO. They can be fairly hands on because they are very passionate about the specifics of what the company is building. The best of these have incredible intuition and domain knowledge, and are highly successful.

Yeah I was being a little flippant.

CEO - Chief EXECUTION officer. Isn't building and designing the "big piece" of execution. If he's involved in the actual execution then that means is a company laser focused on "executing" its vision.

I just wish more middle management at my company knew how the product worked.

To that I agree. I wasn't talking so much about startups. Admittedly a CEO(quite often a founder) there plays a much more instrumental role.

It's 'executive' not 'execution'

In a nutshell: fire and fob off