Nowadays corporate CEOs do less of this actual value driving and instead spend most of their day vaguely fluttering between meetings and dashing out inspirational tweets. A study by researchers at Harvard tracked some of these top executives during their daily routines in an attempt to break down "what a CEO really does all day." And while the study grouped each activity into impressive-sounding categories like "people and relationships" and "business unit reviews," looking under the hood there wasn't a whole lot going on. The study and others like it are supposed to glorify an executive class that rarely has to justify its existence, benefitting operators people who are "doing a lot of stuff" without being evaluated for it and glorifying the idea of busywork over execution. The most obvious example of this is that executives spend 72% of their day in "meetings" with no evaluation of what these meetings are or whom they benefit. In fact, the CEOs in the Harvard study even acknowledged that most of their meetings could be half the time and that these gatherings were taking up overlong chunks of their day.
In the extreme, some CEOs like Musk have taken on the management of multiple large companies. Jack Dorsey famously ran both Twitter and Square on an iPad. Before being charged with fraud in Japan, Carlos Ghosn ran two massive auto manufacturers: Renault and Nissan. Even Steve Jobs ran Apple and Pixar at the same time. If executives have the time to do two "full time" roles, then either they are failing to contribute enough to the roles they're participating in or their roles aren't onerous enough to require one's full attention. And yet they receive an outsize amount of pay based on their perceived market power rather than the true value added.
In theory, the company's board of directors is supposed to rein in the CEO, acting as an independent accountability mechanism to make sure the best interests of workers, shareholders, and customers are taken into account. But in reality, many of these boards have conflicts of interests and little actual connection to the underlying businesses they're supposed to be overseeing. A 2013 survey by the consulting firm McKinsey found that just 16% of board members said they had a working understanding of the company's industry and another 2014 survey found that a plurality of executives and even board members themselves cited the board of directors as the primary reason that businesses were focused on short-term results instead of real growth. And yet, many of these same board members are CEOs of other firms and rack up sizable paychecks rubber stamping their executive brethren's decisions. Take, for instance, the board of directors at Tesla, which is embroiled in a shareholder lawsuit over a pay package set up for Musk in 2018 that ended up being worth roughly $56 billion. Two of the longtime board members who helped approve the package James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox, and Antonio Gracias, the CEO of the investment firm Valor Equity Partners said that they were longtime friends and had taken family vacations with Musk. Another board member, Ira Ehrenpreis, who was in charge of the compensation committee that determined the pay package, said: "We never had the kind of relationship with Elon where he was punching the clock."
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