Top lists about the most successful companies and the richest people are popular – the business magazine “Fortune” also does them regularly. But it’s just as exciting to see what it looks like on the other side of the coin – i.e. which company boss doesn’t enjoy the admiration of business at the moment. In first place this year: Elon Musk, head of companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Boring and Neuralink. For a long time, Musk was considered untouchable. Within a few years he became the richest person in the world; his unconventional management of Tesla in particular brought him fame and money in equal measure.
In the meantime, Fortune writes in a current evaluation, the image of Musk among his colleagues has changed. When asked who was actually the most overrated CEO, 399 CEOs voted for him. This has different reasons.
On the one hand, there is Elon Musk’s ever-worsening addiction to announcements. Numerous projects, products and goals that he announced either on his social media platform or in interviews came to nothing. New cars arrive years later, prophecies of technical achievements by his companies do not come true, employees rebel and hyped products, such as Tesla’s humanoid robot or the Cybertruck, are hyped up with cheap tricks.
For example, when presenting the stainless steel truck, Musk claimed that it was faster than a Porsche 911. As proof, he showed a video of an alleged quarter-mile race in which the Cybertruck not only finished ahead of the Porsche, but also was pulling a trailer that had another Porsche on it. The applause was huge, but it didn’t last long. Shortly afterwards it came out: Actually it was only the eighth of a mile and the whole race couldn’t be carried out for “safety reasons”. Mathematically, one is certain that the truck would have won. That is also not correct.
Same thing with the robot: Without any major intermediate steps in its development, Musk suddenly showed gigantic breakthroughs in the robot’s movement sequences on X, formerly Twitter. At first it seemed that the robot would actually be able to perform fine motor tasks. Until someone took a closer look – because Optimus, that’s what the human-like box is called, was controlled by a real person and didn’t carry out the movements himself.
The list of these sleights of hand goes on – at almost every company Musk owns or runs. From a purely economic perspective, this is probably not very sustainable. Because with every fraud that is uncovered, not only Musk’s reputation declines, but also that of the respective products that he thereby devalues.
Things only got really bad after the takeover of Twitter, now called X. Apart from the questionable management of the employees, countless layoffs and a noticeable shift to the right on the platform, which Musk apparently does not want to counteract, the acquisition of the company was also not an economically wise decision. It is currently assumed that the value of Twitter has fallen by around 71 percent since Musk – expressed in numbers: Musk turned 44 billion US dollars into 12.5 billion in a year and a half.
This mismanagement, including the verbal gaffes that have become increasingly noticeable from Musk in recent months, may have led the other business bosses to conclude that Elon is currently one thing above all: extremely overvalued.
Incidentally, in second place in the ranking is one of Musk’s arch enemies, to whom he said a very serious “Go fuck yourself” at a press conference in November. This refers to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who, despite great resistance and mass layoffs, cannot stop his company’s economic losses and cannot maneuver the stock value out of its current low.
On the other side of the ranking is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently achieved a gigantic success: Microsoft became a $3 trillion company and moved ahead of Apple to become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
