Actually, he’s not the richest man in the world.
He was the richest man earlier this year, before the value of his Tesla stock took a slow downhill ride, from about $400 per share last January to about $125 this week. But it looks like Elon Musk is now in second place, behind French businessman Bernard Arnault, the chair and CEO of LVMH, the company that owns luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hennessey, Marc Jacobs, and Sephora.
That’s not why I feel sorry for Elon Musk, however. Second place is still respectable.
It was the Twitter vote that broke my heart.
Elon Musk is 51 years old, meaning that he was not yet born in 1969, when Dr. Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published a book called The Peter Principle.
Simply stated, the ‘Peter Principle’ is based upon Dr. Peter’s research into the functioning of American corporations, and his theory that competent employees are generally promoted to positions of ever greater responsibility, while incompetent employees are not promoted. Makes sense, on the face of it.
The problem with this system is that every competent employee ultimately reaches a level where he’s no longer competent, and is no longer able to be promoted. Thus we end up with the awkward principle:
“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
And the corollary principle:
“In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”
Of course, the ‘Peter Principle’ doesn’t apply, exactly, to Elon Musk’s unfortunately position, because he was not ‘promoted’ to be CEO of Twitter. He bought the position, back in October. For $44 billion. (I personally wouldn’t have paid even $10 billion for that position.)
Nevertheless, he bought himself a position he is obviously incompetent to fill. After embarrassing himself with several terrible policy decisions that threaten to flush Twitter down the social media toilet, he posted a message to his Twitter followers — about 120 million of them? — that they could vote on whether he should to step down as CEO.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” he wrote in a tweet. “I will abide by the results of this poll.”
58% of those voting gave him the ‘thumbs down’. (It’s not immediate clear how many of those Twitter users had previously read The Peter Principle.)
A day later, Elon tweeted that he would, indeed, step down.
Eventually.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
Imagine paying $44 billion dollars for the privilege of supervising a bunch of software geeks. How sad is that.
I don’t actually have a Twitter account, so I’m hearing about this stuff, second-hand. But if I had a Twitter account, I would have voted to allow Elon to remain the CEO.
Not because he’s doing a good job. He’s obviously risen to his level of incompetence. Or more accurately, he’s obviously bought his level of incompetence, which comes out to basically the same thing.
When the company’s CEO is incompetent, it doesn’t bode well for the company’s future. The thing is, I have little hope that he will find a person foolish enough to take the job. He might well be the only person foolish enough.
For that reason, I feel sorry for Elon Musk.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.