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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

(www.ycombinator.com)
1106 points sama | 1 comments | 15 Sep 16 18:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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LordHumungous ◴[15 Sep 16 18:59 UTC] No.12508800[source]▶
>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.

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TheSpiceIsLife ◴[15 Sep 16 19:12 UTC] No.12508929[source]▶
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?

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1. mholmes680 ◴[15 Sep 16 19:46 UTC] No.12509213[source]▶
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.