One of the biggest concerns that Twitter’s board of directors had with naming Jack Dorsey as the company’s permanent CEO was the fact that he was already the CEO of Square, but obviously they decided to go through with the decision anyway. This means Jack Dorsey is now among the handful of people in the world that are CEOs of two major companies, the most famous of which is Elon Musk, who runs both SpaceX and Tesla Motors at the same time. However, in a recent interview, Musk warned Dorsey that running two companies at once is a bad idea, and recommended that he not do it.
Elon Musk is perhaps the most famous living dual-CEO in the world, running both electric car maker Tesla and space transportation outfit SpaceX at the same time. He was joined yesterday in the chief executive multitasking club by Jack Dorsey, who will now lead both Twitter and mobile payments company Square simultaneously. But don’t ask Musk how or why he does it. In fact, don’t take any advice from him on running two huge multi-billion-dollar corporations. He says it’s a bad idea. “I wouldn’t recommend running two companies,” Musk said today onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit during a panel with Y Combinator president and investor Sam Altman and New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “It decreases your freedom quite a lot.” Sorkin wanted to know what it was like running two companies, especially now that Dorsey now has two CEO positions to handle. The 44-year-old serial entrepreneur and prospective Mars nuclear terraform specialist is known for his inhuman work ethic and the demands he puts on Tesla and SpaceX employees. Musk flies many times a week between the Hawthorne, California SpaceX headquarters outside Los Angeles and the Tesla factory in Fremont near San Francisco. He also has five children, and apparently somehow has the time to take them camping.
