It's impressive to fall out of the public grace as quickly as Elon Musk has over the past few months. Between his fumbled acquisition of Twitter to his outright offensive and bigoted Tweets to his general addiction to being the headline news story every single day, he seems to have completed exhausted America's patience.
Which is a shame because at his core, I still very much believe he's probably one of the best, if not the best, "executive" we have in business today. This isn't because he's a good role model for our kids, because no good role model would tweet something as boneheaded as, "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." And this isn't because I think he's just that much more brilliant than every other tech CEO, because there are other examples of executives (Cook, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc) who created similar shareholder value in half the amount of lunacy. And this isn't because I think he's good at establishing a great company culture, because between the sexual harassment allegations at Tesla and the apparent long hours he pushes his teams to work, it seems pretty clear he views his employees more as human capital than as humans.
I think he deserves the title of "Best Executive in Business Today" because he's clearly done a remarkable job at hiring a strong, dedicated team of leaders below him at each of his companies and empowering them to make tough decisions on their own. I'm not sure there's a more important trait to have as an executive than that.
I don't even know how many companies Elon has his name on at this point. Twitter. Tesla. SpaceX. OpenAI. The Boring Company. Neuralink. The list seems to go on and on. As brilliant as Elon Musk is, no person on the face of the planet could properly run this many unique and complex companies at once.
But look at the success of each. Tesla's EV market share in the US still hovers around 65%. SpaceX is now reportedly valued at $140 billion and is arguably the most advanced space exploration institution on the planet. OpenAI launched demos of DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT, which are pushing the limits of what daily activities AI can lend a hand in. And Neuralink is killing monkeys at a rate previously unthinkable.
Elon can set a vision for all of these accomplishments, but they're far too complex and impressive for us to reasonably believe one man gets all the credit for these. These were all accomplished by incredibly robust leadership teams and strong executives at each of the organizations, whether it was Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX or Greg Brockman at OpenAI. You can fault Elon Musk for an awful lot, and increasingly so. But you cannot fault him for his ability to recognize and empower great leadership talent, and that's ultimately why he's seen as the success he is today.
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