Musk is breaking the CEO stereotype
Tesla head has driven right over what’s seen as conventional behaviour
The most stunning thing Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview may have been that “I do not respect the SEC,” pointedly criticizing the very regulatory agency that he recently settled with, banning him from being his company’s chairman for three years and mandating he and his company to fork over $20 million (U.S.) each.
The least controversial may have been his answer to Lesley Stahl of CBS News when she described his behaviour over the summer as “un-CEO-ish”: “I don’t really want to try to adhere to some CEO template.” That may seem obvious to anyone who has watched Musk’s behaviour, particularly in recent months.
Still, it’s perhaps the most telling line from the interview, because it is in part Musk’s desire to not act like other CEOs and his willingness to say things other business leaders don’t that gains him so much attention.
“We’re talking about norms, really — that’s what we talk about when we talk about Elon Musk,” said Gregory Shill, a professor at the University of Iowa’s business school who studies corporate governance and securities regulation.
Coming at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is shredding norms of what it means to be “presidential,” Musk has driven right over what’s seen as conventional behaviour for a public company CEO. The leader of multiple companies at once, Musk has been known to sleep on the factory floor and dive in on operational details while upending one industry sacred cow after another.
But he’s also called critics names on Twitter. He’s taken a hit of weed during a live podcast, said a Wall Street analyst’s questions were boneheaded in an earnings call, joked about his company going bankrupt on April Fool’s Day and bizarrely called a British explorer who helped with the Thai rescue diver a “pedo” on Twitter.
And of course, he tweeted about taking his company private and that funding was “secured” when the SEC alleges it wasn’t, landing him in hot water with the regulator.
That’s partly why he gets so much attention, Shill suggested.
People seek out patterns when they see unconventional behaviour, and a number of people have seen something familiar in Musk to Trump.
“If Hillary Clinton were president, I don’t think Elon Musk would get the attention he has in the same way,” Shill said. “We have somebody who’s engaging in behaviour that bears some behaviour similar to the president’s,” and people look for whether or not they will be held accountable. Musk was asked in the 60 Minutes interview whether he saw any similarities between himself and the president. He appears to respond that there aren’t “zero similarities,” saying Trump is “amazingly good at Twitter” and he thinks the idea of a space force is good — but also disagreeing with Trump’s support for oil and gas and saying “we obviously do not agree on the environment.”
Other governance experts also made the comparison. Musk, said Jay Dubow, a former SEC lawyer and co-chair of Pepper Hamilton’s securities and financial services enforcement group, “says things that most people in those positions wouldn’t say, except perhaps the president.”
It’s a reminder that in some ways, a wide gulf remains between how we expect CEOs to behave and what’s actually required for them to do and not do.
“It’s really bizarre that he would go out of his way to stick his thumb in the SEC’s eye and criticize them when he’s still CEO and director of a public company,” Dubow said.
“But there’s no prohibition of him saying things about [the SEC]. It’s not illegal.”