Fun bit: Mr. Musk does not take a salary, although under California State law, Tesla is required to pay him at least minimum wage. Tesla sends him checks that pay him a little more than $37,000 annually.
Didn't he also get the use of a private jet or something like that? That might be considered part of his compensation and so take him above minimum wage.
Bragging about having a $1 salary is basically telling your employees that you make so much more in other benefits that you can choose to forego the one thing (salary) that makes up the vast majority of their total comp.
He really needs to find a COO. He needs his Tim Cook. This is a good way to show shareholders he's all in, but he's not a genius at Operations, he needs to find someone who is.
what does that mean? haven't both tesla and spaceX historically struggled with operations under his leadership? don't you think he'd have learned by now if he could?
I think you could only honestly say that Tesla and SpaceX have struggled with operations under his leadership if you're ignoring the level of success that both companies reached so far. He's busy, he's admitted and aware of switching costs of leading two companies - there is value to this though of course too; imagine if Elon only focused on Tesla and not SpaceX - where would we be as a society, where would Elon be position wise? He's following his intuition and his heart which he clearly wears on his sleeves. He's a wonderful role model, and we should support everyone the same way he's gained support from others; yes, he was entrepreneurial from a young age, and "got lucky" by knowing to move to the place that dreams are more easily funded. We fail as a society supporting everyone to reach their dreams to the same level, part of the reason are systems in place that are designed to control and funnel everyone into an economically efficient model - however ignoring the qualitative impact - it's why the idea of flexible learning, learning online at your own pace, etc are going to become the future.
Not a bad idea. Elon Musk has Gwynne Shotwell as president at SpaceX and has been really effective at focusing SpaceX on effectively focusing and executing on Falcon 9.
SpaceX effectively has two strong leaders, not just Musk. Musk would be lucky to strike gold twice and find another leader as great (and as complementary) as Gwynne to help run Tesla.
This plan is roughly isomorphic to option compensation. It has a serious incentive compatibility problem: the value of the options increases with volatility/risk, so incentivizes unnecessary, and even negative expectation, risk taking. Maybe Musk has a big enough stake in Tesla to mitigate this effect, but it's definitely not a risk free approach for minority shareholders.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] threadA first minimum wage CEO of a public company?
He also had enough cash in the bank prior to re-joining that he didn't really need the money.
SpaceX effectively has two strong leaders, not just Musk. Musk would be lucky to strike gold twice and find another leader as great (and as complementary) as Gwynne to help run Tesla.