Tesla’s stock has spent the past few months on autopilot, barreling toward a crash. Protesters angry with CEO Elon Musk’s politics are burning electric-vehicle charging stations and vandalizing Cybertrucks, leading some owners to offload the cars before they become the next targets. A JP Morgan analyst said last week that the precipitous drop of some 50% of Tesla’s market cap was unprecedented in the auto industry. And instead of returning to the dusty Tesla floor where he used to sleep to inspire workers to “give it their all,” Musk is continuing to play Donald Trump’s all-powerful “first buddy” in Washington.
Musk’s reign at the Department of Government Efficiency has made Tesla investors want their CEO back. But he’s far from the first chief executive to go AWOL.
Absent leadership “is something of a silent epidemic in corporations,” says Laura McHale, the managing director of the professional coaching firm Conduit Consultants Limited. It can take several forms, she says: from “leader distance,” where CEOs are physically OOO as they court investors or go on the panel circuit or communicate infrequently, to psychological neglect (lacking direction, not delegating, failing to give employees proper recognition). While absenteeism is quieter than headline-making destructive behaviors like bullying or abuse, McHale says it’s more common, and it can be just as harmful to company morale and productivity. “And yet, it’s almost never talked about.”
The scope of the issue is hard to measure in part because what modern CEOs do all day — Musk included — is somewhat of a mystery. Until about 50 years ago, a chief executive’s time was largely trackable, as they spent most of their day closely overseeing their company’s product. But as mergers and IPOs became more common and corporations became more global, the CEO’s role shifted from an internal product leader to a public figure aiming to drive shareholder value on the world stage. Today, many top CEOs jump from executive positions at companies in different industries rather than working their way up and learning a company inside and out. As they focus on building their personal brand or even working with an eye on the company’s future, they may lose sight of the day-to-day operations that build strong company cultures. A 2009 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that as CEOs become superstars as well-known as the companies they run, they begin to underperform. The “consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative,” the study concludes.
Even at smaller firms, leaders’ attention can become easily diverted. At startups in particular, CEOs have to focus on raising money and pleasing investors, which often takes them away from their offices. This absenteeism can turn “toxic,” McHale says. “It is very destructive for employees and systems. It minimizes the importance of social relationships with our leaders.” A 2015 Interact/Harris Poll of US workers found that most of the communication issues people had with their company leaders weren’t about bullying or demeaning, but about what their bosses weren’t doing: from not knowing employees’ names to not giving clear directions or recognizing their achievements. A paper from 2010 found that “laissez-faire” leadership was more prevalent than other types of destructive leadership. And a recently updated paper found that companies whose CEOs work remotely were more likely to underperform and have lower valuations.
Musk is far from the first CEO to try to wear the hat in two places: Steve Jobs ran Apple and Pixar simultaneously, and Jack Dorsey oversaw Twitter and Square (now Block). But Jobs was a largely hands-off manager at Pixar, delegating tasks to other execs. Twitter has always been difficult to monetize and effectively moderate, and Dorsey stepped down in 2021.
But much as there’s no comparison for Tesla’s plunge in value, Musk himself is incomparable. In addition to Tesla, Musk has on his plate Neuralink, X, The Boring Company, SpaceX, and xAI. He remains chief executive of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI — that’s in addition to posting on X at a dizzying pace and fathering 14 children. In 2022, when he added Twitter to his empire of influential businesses, some management experts speculated that he’d bitten off more than he could chew. Musk slashed staff by 80% and ran the hobbled blue bird alongside his other companies for several months before naming Linda Yaccarino as CEO. A radically new version of Twitter, renamed X, still worked, defying many predictions that it would break under the pressure. Amid his X takeover, Tesla’s stock also plummeted from a high of $309 a share in September 2022 to a low of $103 in January 2023 — because of concerns around EV demand, rising inflation and interest rates, and Musk’s distractions at Twitter. But Tesla stock roared back through the rest of 2023.
So when Musk began raiding the federal government’s IT system in the name of cost cutting, many were slow to count him out. Perhaps he could bring the outsider energy needed to pare down bureaucracy and keep his companies humming at the same time. So far, DOGE has fired thousands of workers, canceled lifesaving aid, and produced all-around chaos. You can debate how well Musk’s tactics are working to cut government waste, but it’s undeniable now that DOGE and Musk’s political involvement are eating away at his biggest cash cow.
When it comes to Tesla, Musk is the missing CEO who isn’t really missing — he’s everywhere else. He dominates headlines each day, his face appearing constantly in the press and his posts gaining eyeballs all over X. That’s part of Tesla’s problem. Owners and potential buyers of the cars no longer can separate Musk’s political ideology from the brand, and his brutal cost-cutting tactics have turned people off. But it’s not just Musk’s divided attention and political unpopularity affecting the once premiere EV company: Tesla is facing several roadblocks, including increased competition in the electric-vehicle industry from Chinese manufacturers and uncertainty around the development of its fully autonomous self-driving software.
Jumping in and out of the daily grind of companies “is especially problematic when you’re a micro-manager,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School. We know that Musk “likes to really get into the weeds and into the details,” Yoffie notes. But there aren’t enough hours in a day to micromanage a handful of companies — and that makes it harder to dive deep into the core issues of each. In January and February, Musk was reportedly sleeping on the floor of his DOGE office across the street from the White House, adapting his hardcore playbook from working at Tesla and Twitter to show his dedication at DOGE. Musk traveled with Trump to Mar-a-Lago for a donor dinner as recently as this weekend. Following the election, he spent so much time at Trump’s Florida oasis that the president joked: “Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him.”
Sometimes CEOs go long periods without seeing their employees or they communicate sporadically over email with staff in a way that creates more separation between themselves and workers. “Without a finger on the pulse of what’s really going on in their organization, they start losing credibility because they often will helicopter in, blow things up a little bit, create a big kerfuffle,” Lori Dernavich, an executive coach and leadership development advisor, says of absent CEOs.
With Musk, the absenteeism isn’t so silent. Tesla backer Christopher Tsai said he hopes Musk’s “involvement with DOGE is short-lived so he can spend even more time on his businesses.” Ross Gerber, a Tesla shareholder, told Business Insider in February that he was concerned about the other ventures that are pulling Musk’s attention away from Tesla. “His 100% focus is on AI, and that’s really a detriment to Tesla more than it’s a plus for xAI and all the other businesses because he doesn’t work at Tesla anymore,” Gerber said. “If he were putting all of his time into Full Self-Driving, I’d feel a lot more confident about Tesla.”
Some founders start companies with an entrepreneurial spirit but find themselves bored with the day-to-day tasks of a CEO. That’s generally a time for them to transition to a chairman role — perhaps like Dorsey did with Twitter when he was pushed out of his role as CEO in 2008 — but not all willingly bow out. As a result, “their sporadic presence means that they become a bottleneck for the organization,” Dernavich says. “That bottleneck leads to resentment, poor decision-making, slower response times, and the culture gets affected. So much can start going haywire when that happens.”
Asked how he’s running his businesses alongside the demands of DOGE, Musk recently told Fox Business in a rare interview that he is doing so “with great difficulty.” It was a bad week. An outage took X offline (Musk later blamed a “massive cyberattack” originating in Ukraine, which experts have cast doubt on), and a second SpaceX rocket exploded during a launch. Tesla lost $127 billion in market cap in one day. Trump just bought a Tesla with hopes of boosting the car’s popularity. He’ll have to buy quite a few more to make up for Tesla’s losses. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Musk could afford for his wealth to drop by $100 billion or more in support of his political opinions, and his other companies are doing just fine. But being one of the most powerful people in the world means your actions and views have an outsize effect on everyone, including customers, shareholders, and workers at Tesla. Musk may have the stamina to hold out. The others may not.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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