Elon Musk, the un-CEO

Elon Musk, the un-CEO

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. But you shouldn’t think of him as a regular CEO, he told a Delaware court yesterday, as he took the stand to argue the case for his $56 billion Tesla compensation package as part of a shareholder lawsuit against him.

“CEO is often viewed as somewhat of a business-focused role,” Musk told the court , which is certainly an interesting way to start off a sentence.

• “In reality, my role is much more that of an engineer developing technology and making sure that we develop breakthrough technologies and that we have a team of incredible engineers who can achieve those goals,” he added.
• “At SpaceX it’s really that I’m responsible for the engineering of the rockets and Tesla for the technology in the car that makes it successful,” he said. Just call him technoking , right?

In fact, Musk may be demurring from the CEO role at some of his businesses.

• James Murdoch, long-time Tesla board member and friend of Musk, told the court that Musk had recently identified a potential successor for his CEO role at Tesla, though the identity of that person wasn’t revealed.
• “I did not want to be CEO,” Musk said at one point. Antonio Gracias, a former board member and also a friend of Musk, told the court that the board had in the past considered alternative CEOs, but not found a suitable replacement.
• He may look to get out of his new gig, too. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” Musk said at one point during the trial. (For what it’s worth, Jack Dorsey is not interested .)

At the root of all this is a question of time, energy, and focus. The lawsuit contends that Musk used his position of leverage over the Tesla board to negotiate a huge compensation package, such that he was able to receive huge tranches of options without working singularly on Tesla.

• Musk argued that he worked incredibly hard: "The amount of pain, no words can express," he said. "It’s pain I would not wish to inflict upon anyone."
• "I pretty much work all the time," he added. "I don’t know what a punch clock would achieve."

The presiding judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, will have to determine whether the case against Musk stacks up, though a verdict isn't expected for months . She might need some of that time to work out what Musk and the board even thought the expectations of his job were all along.

SBF lays it bare

Just when you think the FTX saga couldn’t get any more weird, former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried went and had a confessional conversation with Vox’s Kelsey Piper via Twitter DM. It's an ... unconventional approach when you’re under investigation by federal authorities, but by this point little should surprise us.

Anyway, the message exchange makes for fairly eye-opening reading . Here are some choice cuts.

On regulators:

• “F*** regulators. They make everything worse. They don’t protect consumers at all.”

On talking the talk on ethics:

• “It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it, by this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

On how FTX got into the mess with Alameda:

• “It wasn’t quite lending out – it was messier and more organic than that; each step was in isolation rational and reasonable, and then when we finally added it all up last week, it wasn’t.”

On his biggest mistake:

• “You know what was maybe my biggest single f*** up? The one thing *everyone* told me to do … Chapter 11.”

• "A month ago, I was one of the world's greatest fundraisers. Now, I'm the fallen wreckage of one."

A MESSAGE FROM THE FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION

Hear some of the biggest players in fintech discuss the industry’s most pressing issues at the Financial Technology Association’s inaugural Fintech Summit: Shaping the Future of Finance. Produced in partnership with Protocol, all sessions of the event are now available to live-stream.

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People are talking

Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas said the worst of the FTX debacle could be yet to come :

• "What we are seeing now is a fallout of FTX is becoming much more like the 2008 financial crisis where it's exposing poor credit practices and is exposing poor risk management."

George K. Lerner, a psychiatrist and performance coach at FTX, doesn’t think Sam Bankman-Fried is a “criminal mastermind”:

• “I just can’t see him doing that, honestly … I mean, I guess maybe I would have to sit down with him and understand why. But I have difficulties making that jump.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has high hopes for expanding operations in China and India:

• “We’re very, very bullish about what’s happening in Asia.”

Amazon employees have expressed concern about a lack of clarity around who the company’s layoffs will hit. Per Bloomberg, one employee wrote :

• “No one is safe.”

Making moves

Amazon is offering voluntary buyouts to some employees, according to CNBC. That’s alongside the layoffs it has already started, which were confirmed yesterday by senior vice president of devices & services Dave Limp.

TuSimple cofounder Mo Chen now has control of the company, with 59% of the voting power. TuSimple is currently under investigation for its relationships with a Chinese startup linked to Chen.

Evernote has been acquired by Bending Spoons, an Italian app developer. The deal is expected to complete early 2023.

In other news

Twitter is being sued by a contractor it fired. The lawsuit alleges Twitter failed to provide proper notice, final pay, and expense reimbursement.

Call it contagion: The Winklevoss twins' Gemini Earn crypto lending program has had to halt withdrawals in the wake of the FTX disaster. That follows BlockFi considering filing for bankruptcy .

The U.K. won’t allow a takeover of its largest chip factory. Nexperia, a Dutch chip company owned by China’s Wingtech, was ordered by the U.K. government to sell at least 86% of the plant.

Activision Blizzard games are going offline in China after the company failed to reach a licensing agreement with NetEase. Foreign game developers must have a domestic Chinese partner to distribute games in the country.

SpaceX workers claim they were fired for speaking out about Elon Musk, The New York Times reports.

How bad is the state of U.S. broadband? Pretty bad , according to a study by The Verge and Consumer Reports.

A MESSAGE FROM THE FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION

Hear some of the biggest players in fintech discuss the industry’s most pressing issues at the Financial Technology Association’s inaugural Fintech Summit: Shaping the Future of Finance. Produced in partnership with Protocol, all sessions of the event are now available to live-stream.

Watch here