Any other CEO would have been fired for what Elon Musk just said

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — Part of the deal with being CEO is that you get a big paycheck in exchange for being the public face of a company. For most people, at most companies, that means, at minimum, trying not to make an ass of yourself in public.

Tweeting a Holocaust joke, for example, might very well get you booted. Punching down at marginalized communities? Also a bad look.

But the same rules don’t apply if you’re the richest person on the planet, running companies stacked with cronies.

ICYMI: On Monday, Elon Musk invoked the names of two German Nazis in a tweet while simultaneously disparaging modern pronoun conventions — attempting, as he so often does, to make a joke. (I’m not repeating the text here — not because it’s profane, but mostly because it’s just not funny.)

For context, Musk was responding to a post about a Der Spiegel article that compared him to a media mogul who helped Hitler climb to power.

It was hardly Musk’s first, and certainly not his most offensive, statement involving the Third Reich or their White supremacist progeny. Just last month, Musk promoted Tucker Carlson’s widely condemned interview with a Nazi apologist who said the murder of Jews in concentration camps was “humane” and that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II. Musk later deleted his X post that called the interview “very interesting” and “worth watching,” per the Independent.

Representatives for X and Tesla didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Musk rarely deletes his social media posts, no matter how inflammatory. Also not deleted: the one where he reposted the “interesting observation” that women are incapable of independent thought and that only “alpha males” should make policy decisions.

And while he once apologized for his post endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory — the one that sparked an exodus of advertisers from X — he never deleted it, either.

The point is: Any other CEO of a major company could expect to be shown the door after airing any one these ideas. Or at least that was the case as recently as 2018, when more CEOs were forced out for “ethical lapses” than poor financial performance, according to a PwC study.

So why is Musk special?

It’s partly because of the way he’s structured his wealth and his companies.

Musk is the single biggest individual shareholder at Tesla, the only publicly traded business he owns. The second-largest individual shareholder is his brother, Kimbal Musk, who sits on the board. In fact, the entire Tesla board of directors is stacked with Musk allies who lack sufficient independence, according to a Delaware judge who in 2023 overturned Musk’s $55 billion pay package.

In other words, the only folks with a fiduciary duty to keep Musk in line are, according to Judge Kathaleen McCormick, not exactly disinterested parties.

But even bullish Tesla investors are starting to get nervous about Musk’s rhetoric online and his “dark MAGA” turn, which could lead to some awkward moments on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“The Musk/Trump dynamic has added to the agita of Tesla investors and it’s not helping the demand issues in the US,” Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told me. “Musk becoming more political is not bullish for the Tesla brand.”

The other major source of Musk’s wealth is SpaceX, a rocket manufacturer that’s been tapped by NASA to resupply the International Space Station.

There are no public shareholders to worry about there, as SpaceX is a private company with virtually zero competition in the market. (Technically, it competes for space contracts with Boeing. But given Boeing’s disastrous last five-ish years, SpaceX probably isn’t sweating the competition too much — especially after NASA called on SpaceX to return two Boeing astronauts from the space station after their space ship broke down.)

Litigation is a key part of the Musk playbook when it comes to any person or group challenging him or his businesses. Angry at advertisers for leaving his Nazi-tolerating social media site, Musk sued a nonprofit ad group out of existence. In fact, Musk and his companies have filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts alone since July of 2023, according to Fortune, targeting “competitors, startups, law firms, watchdog groups, individuals, the state of California, federal agencies, and pop star Grimes, who is the mother of three of his children.”

Bottom line: When you have virtually unlimited money, you have practically unlimited power to play offense – in court, in the boardroom or on social media.

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