Leadership Lessons for Finance

Sometimes it is good to assess whether displays of leadership from CEOs or other C suite managers, not necessarily financial managers, lead to good financial results. Strategies, negotiations, treatment of employees and even how one conducts oneself could have impact on the financial bottom line. Such study is not to make fun of them but to learn from them.

A couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of months ago, I was puzzled by Elon Musk’s initial actions when he took over Twitter. The actions seemed kind of drastic, very harsh and confusing when compared to his history at Tesla and Starlink.

It was discombobulating.

He was lionized as an innovative leader at Tesla and Starlink and now there’s chaos at Twitter.

I’m having a hard time squaring the two. But it is still early days and maybe he has a grand strategy that in the end will lead to everything straightening out.

In the meantime, he has

• lost close to 70% of the work force, either through firings or voluntary quits;
• brought back influencers previously banned due to policy infraction of hate or violent posts;
• has lost some revenue due to advertisers withdrawing upon reinstatement of those unsavory characters;
• and has suffered worldwide outage at Twitter in the face of few engineers to fix the breaks.

There seems to be a spillover effect on Tesla because the investors are worrying his attention on Twitter is taking him away from Tesla and thus, its stock has been declining. The investors are not happy.

I’ve seen a few – just a few – articles or videos that say Elon really did not invent or start Tesla or Starlink, but rather took over the company from other founders. Okay, that is interesting, but I don’t know if that is true. I couldn’t find anything in Wikipedia to back up that story. I prefer to see many sources converging on the same set of facts because that will lend greater weight to those facts. It’s plausible that he just took over those companies.

Nobody invents everything.

We all know Steve Jobs did not invent all of those products that came out of Apple: he inspired the company and employees to create those innovations.

There is also the confusion over his conversion to the right wing mindset? Tesla is an electric car company supposedly started to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and that’s a lefty thing. The conservatives do not believe in climate change (although I think some are changing their minds – the extreme weather we’ve been having the last few years are really hard to ignore) and the liberals are pressing for solutions to climate change. That’s in general – Joe Manchin is an exception.

Tying Tesla with Elon kind of gave Elon a liberal slant, rightly or wrongly.

Now he is bashing the liberals and “wokism” which kind of doesn’t seem like a good strategy. I’ve read that Tesla has lost a few customers, probably liberal customers, because they don’t like what he is doing or saying at Twitter. His strategy for Tesla seems broken with his attacks on liberals.

And finally, there are just some goofy behaviors.

Some of his Twits, such as the Twitter Files, has nothing to do with managing Twitter. The Twitter Files just verges on gossip.

His histrionics with his employees suggest impulsiveness – not a good sign for a CEO. The one I’m thinking of is his reaction to the idea that his tweets are not getting enough views, considering he has 100 million followers. The employee, who was rather impudent, said it may be because the viewers are getting tired of his tweets. He supplied Google trends as supporting data.

The employee was fired.

For me personally, whenever I see videos of his attendance at last year’s Met Gala (spring of 2022) and his goofy antics in front of the cameras, my jaws go slack. Those videos and the idea of CEO behavior – I can’t connect the two with him. He just looks ridiculous. Sergy Brin is about his age and I can’t imagine him doing such goofy antics. George Clooney, who is about 10 years older, may clown around but somehow I imagine it would be a class act.

I kind of think the idea of being the world’s richest man and the concomitant adulation got to his head. So, when someone tells him viewers are getting tired of his tweets, he can’t take it because his ego got so big.

There’s a kind of preening, showoffy behavior.

I do think those goofy behaviors will adversely impact Twitter’s financials and maybe even Tesla’s financials.

We’ll have to give him a year to see if his businesses improve.