By
Svetlana Soroka
April 18th, 2024
According to Elon Musk, the work he does at Twitter and his other companies does not perfectly match the role of a CEO.
Upon acquiring Twitter and running the social media company for less than a month, Elon Musk has confirmed that he may need to appoint another executive to be CEO in his stead. After he eventually purchased Twitter, following the back and forth, Musk appointed himself as the chief executive. This is in addition to his existing responsibilities as the top executive in different companies, including EV company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), where he is also the chief executive.
Elon Musk Will Find Someone Else to be Twitter CEO
However, Elon Musk has confirmed that his position as the CEO of Twitter is temporary. As a matter of fact, he said he does not want to be the CEO of any company. He made his decision known in testimony during a court trial over his compensation package at the EV company.
Elon Musk and Tesla are in trial over the CEO pay package the EV maker granted him in 2018. The compensation plan made the businessman today the wealthiest man in the world. Following the CEO compensation pay, shareholder Richard J. Tornetta sued Musk and Tesla over the matter. He claimed that the payment was excessive. The plaintiff added that the Tesla board authorizing it equals a breach of its fiduciary duty.
According to Elon Musk, the work he does at Twitter and his other companies does not perfectly match the role of a CEO. He explained:
“At SpaceX it’s really that I’m responsible for the engineering of the rockers and Tesla for the technology in the car that makes it successful. So, CEO is often viewed as somewhat of a business-focused role but in reality, my role is much more that of an engineer developing technology and making sure that we develop breakthrough technologies and that we have a team of incredible engineers who can achieve those goals.”
He added that “great engineers” works for only great engineers, and that is his primary duty before being a CEO. When queried about using Tesla employees at Twitter, Musk said the workers are there on a “voluntary basis,” and they work after hours. He added that the work also lasted for a few days and is already over. Moving forward, Elon Musk also noted that he could not eternally be the CEO of Twitter, considering his other responsibilities at Tesla.
“I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”
As expected, he talked about the FTX crumble that caused investors to lose millions. Musk said the SEC has a good mission, but whether they are executing them should be queried. The billionaire stated that the SEC did not pay enough attention to FTX to be able to caution against the collapse ahead of time. He added, “yet the SEC continued to hound me despite shareholders being greatly rewarded. This makes no sense.”