US billionaire Elon Musk said that he often divides each day for a company he runs, but sometimes the work still overlaps.
“My day is much longer and more complicated than you can imagine,” Elon Musk told the WSJ when asked about dividing his time at the five companies he founded or runs, including Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla. Boring Company and Neuralink. “There’s a lot of context shifting, and it’s pretty annoying.”
The American billionaire revealed that he tries to divide the daily schedule of working at a company, although he can not always follow the plan. For example, during a “day with Tesla”, he may have to quickly get through work to spend the evening on Twitter. The next day, he spent half the day on SpaceX and the other half on some company that needed to prioritize work.
“My work is a bit intertwined, so time management is extremely difficult,” he said.
Often, busy CEOs hire secretaries or assistants to help. Musk said he also has a part-time assistant, but mostly organizes his own schedule.
In February, Musk also described himself as a “nano manager” and always close to the problems at the companies he runs. He told investor Ron Baron that since taking over Twitter last October, his workload has grown from 80 hours to more than 120 hours a week.
“I go to bed, wake up, work, go to bed, wake up, work. That time frame is seven days a week,” Musk said. “I had to, there was no other choice.”
On Saturday Night Live in late 2022, Musk said he usually goes to bed at 2 or 3 a.m., wakes up six hours later, and immediately checks his phone for an emergency.
Experts say that US billionaires are overloaded due to joining too many companies. “One CEO can’t effectively run five companies at once. We shouldn’t expect that,” David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told CNBC.
Last week, Musk said he had selected Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO and that this person would start leading the social network “in about six weeks”.
Bao Lam
