Elon Musk Is Overloaded

Twitter’s new CEO also leads Tesla, SpaceX, and startups working on tunnel digging and brain implants. His social media project will make it harder to juggle them all.

Elon Musk has a lot going on right now. In the week since he bought Twitter for $44 billion, he fired its upper management and laid off thousands of employees, declared himself CEO and sole director, and used tweets and memes to publicly thrash out a dubious business plan that involves charging users $8 a month for benefits that include a blue check mark.

All that is just Musk’s new side gig. The world’s richest man is perhaps now its busiest, revamping Twitter while also serving as CEO of electric-auto maker Tesla; rocket maker SpaceX; the Boring Company, which digs tunnels for transit; and Neuralink, which is testing brain implants meant to eventually connect humans with computers.

How does Musk manage and lead all those complex projects at the same time? His performance is probably patchy—and at risk of getting more so. “It's not possible for a CEO to run four or five companies equally effectively,” says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Musk and his businesses. “That's not the expectation we should have.” Taking on a new CEO role at a company in an unfamiliar industry at a time when Musk’s other ventures face complex challenges will only make juggling them all more difficult.

It’s not a good time for Musk to be distracted from Tesla, his most valuable company. Under his management it has made strides in battery technology, production, and automated driving, and has rapidly ramped up sales. The company delivered an impressive 343,000 vehicles worldwide in the third quarter of 2022, an increase of more than a third over the same period a year earlier. But Tesla faces pressure from other automakers producing competitive electric vehicles of their own, and it has a deepening and potentially difficult dependency on China.

More than a dozen new EVs from various brands will debut in the US alone in the next couple of years. A Bank of America Merrill Lynch report published in June estimated that Tesla’s share of the EV market could decline from over 70 percent in 2021 to the low teens by 2025. The company is also facing several lawsuits over accidents involving Tesla’s Autopilot automated driving system and, according to a recent report from Reuters, a criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice into Tesla’s “full self-driving” software package that cannot fully self-drive.

Tesla’s dependence on China brings competitive and political risks. The company sources crucial raw materials from Chinese mines, and almost half its manufacturing capacity is now in a vast factory in Shanghai. But China’s automakers are rapidly electrifying, and its government has shown willingness to pressure Musk politically. In October, Musk told the Financial Times that China had told him it disapproved of the rollout of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine. The entrepreneur went on to parrot Chinese policy on Taiwan, saying that the country should become a “special administrative zone” of China.

Operating in China could get more difficult for Musk if the country’s leaders dislike how he operates Twitter. Government news sources there have complained that the platform labels its staff on the platform as “China state-affiliated media,” and Twitter recently disrupted China-based operations said to be using the site to influence the US midterm elections.

Tesla’s stock has fallen significantly in the months since Musk announced his plan to acquire Twitter. Yoffie says that may be a sign investors worry he is stretched too thin. In 2018, when Tesla suffered a production crunch, Musk rallied his workers and slept some nights at the factory.

He may be less able to pitch in on future crises. “Fundamentally, Elon is a micro-manager,” Yoffie says. “If he had bought Twitter during that period of time, he wouldn't have been able to give Tesla any attention whatsoever.”

SpaceX, where Musk is both CEO and lead designer, also has a busy schedule and some complex management challenges. An official with NASA, which has signed a $3 billion contract to use the company’s heavy-lift rocket Starship, said last week that the craft could make its maiden voyage as soon as this December. But the US Federal Aviation Administration announced in June that SpaceX is required to make 75 changes to Starship to mitigate environmental impacts, and the agency has not yet approved the rocket for launch.

Like Tesla, SpaceX has also entangled Musk in geopolitics. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the company—with some US government support—donated 20,000 Starlink satellite internet terminals to help keep Ukrainian military and civilians online. This October, Musk said SpaceX could no longer afford to provide that service, citing $100 million in costs by year’s end. A week later, after bad press about that move, he reversed himself, saying SpaceX would keep funding Starlink service to Ukraine. Amid the recent drama, Musk found time to tweet out a controversial peace plan for Russia’s invasion, involving Ukraine ceding territory to its attacker. Musk later denied claims he had discussed the war in Ukraine with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but said they had spoken about space.

The Boring Company and Neuralink, Musk’s other main interests, are younger than Tesla and SpaceX and have so far been less successful. The former, founded in 2016, completed prototype tunnels in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, but plans to build underground links connecting New York and Washington, DC; Chicago’s downtown with an airport; and downtown Los Angeles with Dodger Stadium have stalled. In a TED interview in 2017, Musk said the Boring Company accounted for about 2 to 3 percent of his time. Musk originally proposed a hyperloop—a pressurized tube through which things can travel at high speed using magnetic levitation—as a more efficient form of transportation, but his company has more recently backed away from the idea. SpaceX this year disassembled one of its Los Angeles test tunnels, turning the site into a parking lot.

Neuralink, which works on brain implants for controlling a computer, was also founded in 2016. Musk has previously said he planned to have regulatory approval for the brain chips by 2020, and would begin human trials in 2022, but the company is behind schedule. Neuralink has held more than just business interest for Musk. This July, Business Insider revealed that Musk had twins with one of the company’s executives, Shivon Zilis, in November 2021.

Is there method to this Muskness? Andy Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard, argues that Musk’s businesses share a pattern of tackling complex problems that require mastering large scale through huge capital investment, daring bets, and persuading employees and investors to believe in the bigger mission.

The Twitter acquisition doesn’t yet fit that pattern. Wu has been impressed by how quickly the new CEO has sought to reorganize the company, but he has yet to see clear communication about the mission. Musk’s takeover of Twitter doesn’t provide a clear and inspiring engineering goal like Tesla and SpaceX—the company’s business problems are mostly people problems. And his apparent focus on free speech appears somewhat at odds with the challenge of running a social media company safely and profitably. Musk in recent days appeared to backtrack on earlier suggestions he would strip away Twitter’s content moderation policies, to the dismay of some supporters of his project.

Wu says it is important to separate distaste or ardor for Musk’s politics or personal life from any assessment of his business skills. He points out that juggling more than one CEO job is not unprecedented, and that many investors take an active hand in multiple ventures. “The closest analogy is after Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, he was affiliated with both Pixar and Next Computing—and did pretty innovative things at both companies,” Wu says. He adds, however, that Tesla and SpaceX are probably a lot more complex and challenging to manage.

One of Musk’s talents cuts across his ventures without conflict. Yoffie says that Tesla and its stock price has benefited hugely from the entrepreneur’s antics on Twitter, which include interacting with customers, hyping up investors, and taking aim at critics. Taking control of the platform that has helped him burnish his personal brand has so far only made his voice—and its reverberations around the business world—that much louder. “He gets an amazing amount of free PR,” Yoffie says.

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