The CEO role is Chief Ivory Tower Visionary. As CEO, your #1 job is to set the vision and strategy for the company, and your #2 is to get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off, which is dramatically easier with a strong vision.

He does desperately need a good COO though to make sure Tesla can actually deliver on its promises.

> The CEO role is Chief Ivory Tower Visionary.

No, the CEO role is turning abstract vision into concrete strategy and communicating that strategy especially to investoes, because money people always want to hear things from the horse's mouth. It's a good thing for the CEO to be the visionary rather than channel someone else's vision, if they can do the rest of the job, but they can't be stuck in an ivory tower and think that addressing the path from present reality to distant vision is beneath their dignity.

Lol, my old startup had a great Ivory tower CEO. We ran out of runway after he continually chased any shiny ball that the wind brought him. No monetary plans, no concept of what a usable product could be, just lots and lots of vision, and vague descriptions of implementations to the team.

That doesn't disqualify your statement, but it does highlight that - if that is correct, a COO is needed to put some sanity on the Ivory goals.

Then again, I was working for a startup. I guess that was a success (~25M funding before fizzling), as far as startups are concerned.. lol.

Is it really ideal doing things this way ? Or is it just part of an ego trip, and deciding on such complex things as vision an strategy for a company are better done in a collaborative fashion, maybe with the CEO as the final arbitrer ?

And how much of that image of a all knowing visionary CEO is just a manufactured image ?

It's pretty difficult to generate a coherent vision by committee - you usually end up with something that nobody finds compelling, not even the people who collaborated on it.

And of course the image of an all-knowing visionary CEO is a manufactured image! It's not like people can actually predict the future. Rather, it's selection bias at work. Those CEOs whose vision doesn't resonate end up getting replaced, or their company goes bankrupt, and then they get written out of the history books. The thing is, you need to have a vision to get people excited and actually rowing in the same direction (nevermind the right direction), so without that you're dead in the water anyway.

Sure visions aren't usually created by committee. But aren't visions usually starting very raw, and not really that valuable or unique("let's build a computer for every pocket") - and to get to a coherent and unique vision, you need some research and exploration, which is usually a team effort ?

No argument there (and I think that the success of Musk's companies is largely because of the faceless engineers he hires that toil away to make it a reality).

My point is that left to their own devices, most of those engineers would rather toil away on their own startups or hobby projects, and that convincing them to all work on a tiny piece of a big project requires someone who's both charismatic and has a finger on the pulse of what problems can excite people. Musk has been uniquely successful in aligning people to work on big, hairy, audacious goals.