Vaibhav Taneja and Tom Zhu seem to run Tesla (but Elon obviously designs the trucks)
Steve Davis is CEO of The Boring Company
Jared Birchall is CEO of Neuralink and CFO of xAI so he’s probably running both
I have little to no respect for the man but Elon’s real job is raising money, which isn’t nothing. Start up CEOs often spend a lot of their time raising money and networking while the company is unprofitable. Tesla might be the only one that’s mature and turns a profit. (SpaceX could be profitable and it’s Falcon launch division probably is but between Starlink launches and testing Starship, I’m guessing the company is still in “start up mode” and losing money.)
Start ups usually lose money while they’re getting established. You have build the product, hire the team, and then get customers. So, you lose money for several years — which is why Angel Investors, venture capital firms, etc. exist.
Take a novel medication, for example. You aren’t making a dime until you get FDA (in the U.S.) approval and so you do fundraising rounds to hire staff, do clinical trials, scale up manufacturing, etc. Then, once you get approved, you (ideally) make a fortune.
Ideally for the early stage investors (and staff that was partially compensated in shares), you “make an exit” — get bought by a bigger company or go public. And that’s when everyone gets paid. If a company stays private forever, you repay early investors with dividends or share buybacks (or everyone is just sort of fucked and waiting for an exit). Shares in a private company have value on paper but no store takes SpaceX shares as a payment method.
From what I can tell from the outside:
I have little to no respect for the man but Elon’s real job is raising money, which isn’t nothing. Start up CEOs often spend a lot of their time raising money and networking while the company is unprofitable. Tesla might be the only one that’s mature and turns a profit. (SpaceX could be profitable and it’s Falcon launch division probably is but between Starlink launches and testing Starship, I’m guessing the company is still in “start up mode” and losing money.)
Raising money? Aren’t companies suppose to generate money? Didn’t twitter lose a large portion of its ad revenue?
Start ups usually lose money while they’re getting established. You have build the product, hire the team, and then get customers. So, you lose money for several years — which is why Angel Investors, venture capital firms, etc. exist.
Take a novel medication, for example. You aren’t making a dime until you get FDA (in the U.S.) approval and so you do fundraising rounds to hire staff, do clinical trials, scale up manufacturing, etc. Then, once you get approved, you (ideally) make a fortune.
Ideally for the early stage investors (and staff that was partially compensated in shares), you “make an exit” — get bought by a bigger company or go public. And that’s when everyone gets paid. If a company stays private forever, you repay early investors with dividends or share buybacks (or everyone is just sort of fucked and waiting for an exit). Shares in a private company have value on paper but no store takes SpaceX shares as a payment method.