Sometimes, Elon Musk had a much better year than the typical CEOs, let alone members of this other group.
Tesla:
Tesla’s stock, the most profitable company for him, more than doubled this year, recovering more than half the value it lost during the disastrous year of 2022. Tesla already surpassed its previous annual sales record in the first quarter of the year and finally delivered the long-awaited and promised electric truck.
However, Tesla faced numerous challenges in 2023. The company announced a series of price cuts for its vehicles to maintain demand in the face of increased competition from other automakers’ electric vehicles, which pressured Tesla’s profit margins. While the electric truck may technically be “in production,” Musk warned investors that it would take more than a year for Tesla to start making money on it.
“It will take… a tremendous amount of work to reach production at the volume necessary to achieve positive cash flow at a price that people can afford,” he warned investors in October, before its debut.
Federal safety regulators forced Tesla to recall nearly all of its more than 2 million vehicles on U.S. roads to restrict the use of its autonomous driving system after they said it posed a safety threat, after years of Musk promising that they would indeed operate as fully autonomous taxi robots. Earlier in the year, Tesla was compelled to recall nearly all its vehicles in the United States equipped with the Full Self Driving assistance program. He stated that self-driving cars and robots, a planned but yet-to-be-delivered product, are key to his forecast that Tesla will someday become the most valuable company in the world.
Tesla defended its autonomous driving feature after an investigation by The Washington Post found multiple serious incidents, including some fatalities, where the autonomous driving feature should not have been engaged in the first place. The story was published before the recall announcement.
“Safety indicators overwhelmingly show that when autonomous driving is engaged, it is significantly stronger compared to not being engaged,” according to a tweet posted after the Post report.
SpaceX:
In his space exploration company, SpaceX, the uncrewed test flights of the giant space rocket system that Musk promised a decade ago would take people to the Moon and possibly on their way to Mars, Starship, ended in fiery explosions – not once but twice.
Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
SpaceX stated that the Starship explosions would aid the company.
“Success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX aims to make life multi-planetary,” according to a tweet after the second explosion, a statement similar to what it said after the first explosion.
Twitter:
Of course, Twitter, the social media platform Musk acquired in late 2022, had perhaps the worst year among all of Musk’s companies. It saw a massive flight of advertisers, its primary revenue source, due to the way it has been run under his ownership.
In September, Musk said Twitter’s sales had dropped by 60%, and he threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League over rising hate speech on the platform following Musk’s acquisition of the company.
In June, Musk resigned as CEO and appointed Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal marketing executive, in an attempt to restore advertising. However, his own actions as Twitter’s owner, including retweeting and endorsing a post that claimed Jewish communities were fueling “hatred against whites,” led to another wave of companies withdrawing their ad spending.
On
despite his later apology for the post and calling it stupid, in the same overall appearance, he said that the advertising companies that pulled their money from advertising should go and have sex with themselves. He took a shot at the advertising companies instead of trying to mend relationships, even though he admitted that “this advertising boycott… will kill the company.”
Then Musk continued his attack on advertising companies seeking brand safety by inviting controversial users to return, including some who had previously been banned for violating past service standards, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, along with accounts promoting Nazism.
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney:
A year ago, Bob Iger was promoted to CEO of Disney, to rescue the media giant he had managed from 2005 until the end of 2021 from the problems caused by the tenure of his successor, Bob Chapek.
Iger’s return initially seemed like a successful move. Activist investor Nelson Peltz initially backed away from his plans to win a seat on the Disney board. But problems at Disney, including losses in its streaming service Disney+, persisted. Iger’s solutions to stop the losses – more ads on the service, higher subscription fees, and less content – did nothing to halt the downturn. In fact, the losses in the service increased, leading to a further decline in the company’s stock.
Disney and other production companies and streaming services were affected by a strike by the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, representing 160,000 actors, which nearly shut down film and television production. The strike eventually ended after nearly five months with the unions winning many of their goals.
In July, Iger publicly speculated that the company’s massive television business, comprised of former jewels like ABC and ESPN, “may not be core” to its operations, suggesting that a sale may be on the horizon.
In November, Peltz renewed his proxy war with the company. Disney’s stock ended the year nearly where it was when its board decided to fire Chapek and bring back Iger. Disney did not respond to a request for comment regarding the challenges Iger faced this year.
CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, Greg Becker:
A year ago, many outside the world of tech startups had not heard of Silicon Valley Bank. Few people knew that Greg Becker was the CEO. He surely wishes it were still the case.
But in March, when Becker revealed that the bank was facing a liquidity issue and hoped to raise $2.25 billion in capital, along with selling $21 billion in assets, it triggered a crisis in the U.S. banking system still reeling from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
Becker’s plan to essentially sell U.S. Treasury bonds, which would generate a $1.8 billion loss due to rising interest rates, made matters more unstable. The reality revealed issues before it could reassure the investors it needed to solve the problem and acknowledged that its assets had lost much of their value, prompting a bank run.
Customers rushed to withdraw about $1 million per second, or $42 billion in just 10 hours. The bank collapsed within 48 hours, making it at that time the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history – and the first failure of a digital bank in U.S. financial history, a direct result of its close ties to venture capital and tech companies.
SVB later revealed that it had been previously warned by regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, but it had not changed its practices.
But
Becker tried to claim that the collapse was unexpected.
“I never imagined myself or Silicon Valley Bank in this situation,” said former CEO Greg Becker in statements to the Senate committee investigating the collapse, adding that he was “really sorry for how this affected the employees of Silicon Valley Bank, its clients, and its shareholders.”
However, the issues at Silicon Valley Bank, including the bank’s collapse, triggered a series of failures at other similarly-sized banks, raising fears of a collapse of the U.S. financial system similar to that which occurred during the Great Depression.
Fortunately, that never happened. Promises from the Treasury Department to extend credit to banks and assurances from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that depositors would be compensated above the normal insurance limits helped stop the panic.
As for Becker, he of course lost his job, and his shares in the bank were almost worthless, although he had sold $3.6 million of his shares just weeks before the collapse. So he had enough money to immediately take his family on a trip to Hawaii, which sparked further outrage.
Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Koerner:
A few days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March, Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse told investors that it had discovered “a material weakness” in its financial reporting, indicating that risks had not been properly assessed.
Just one month prior to that revelation, the bank announced its worst annual performance since the global financial crisis.
Depositors raced to withdraw funds during that time – the bank later revealed that clients withdrew 67 billion Swiss francs ($75.2 billion) from their accounts in the first three months of the year. On March 19, the bank agreed to be purchased by its larger rival UBS for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.25 billion), which was a 60% discount to the bank’s value at market close the Friday before the weekend.
Koerner had been appointed CEO in July 2022, and it seemed that some of the investment bank’s problems preceded his tenure. However, he was the final CEO of the banking giant that it once was.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao:
In early 2022, Changpeng Zhao, the cryptocurrency expert and CEO of Binance, was one of the richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg’s billionaire index, with a net worth estimated at around $100 billion.
But by the end of 2023, he pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in the United States. Binance agreed to pay a record fine of $4 billion. Zhao himself paid a fine of $200 million and resigned as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange he founded.
U.S. Justice Department officials described it as the largest corporate settlement ever involving criminal charges against an executive.
“The Binance platform was enabling some really horrible things – from financing terrorism to ransomware, child pornography, and numerous scams and frauds,” according to a senior Treasury official.
Zhao’s troubles are far from over. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, although the final sentence determined by a judge is likely to be much lower. Federal guidelines likely suggest that the upper limit for Zhao’s potential sentence is about 18 months. Ultimately, the sentence is determined by the judge.
Renaissance Capital CEO Bao Fan:
Renaissance Capital, a major investment bank and private equity firm based in Beijing, revealed in February that it was “unable to contact” CEO Bao Fan. This was just the beginning of Bao’s troubles.
In
In March, the company, one of the most important companies in the technology industry in the country, announced that it would suspend trading of its shares and postpone the issuance of its annual results as it still could not reach him.
In June, state media revealed that Bao had been in the custody of the country’s top anti-corruption agency since his disappearance and that his detention had been extended.
Renaissance appointed a temporary replacement for now, and appointed an interim CEO in October.
Chairwoman of Country Garden, Yang Huiyan:
It wasn’t long ago that Country Garden was the largest home construction company in China and Yang Huiyan was one of the richest women in the world. But after the disastrous year of 2023, that seems a distant memory.
In October, Country Garden missed a payment on a $500 million bond. This was seen as a sign of the significant downturn in the real estate market in China, which poses a major threat to the country’s growth prospects.
In August, before this assumption, Bloomberg reported that Yang had lost more wealth than any other billionaire in the world over the past two years, down 84% since June 2021, or $28.6 billion.
Yang and her family pumped billions of dollars into Country Garden in the form of loans and stock and bond purchases, but she will not be able to turn things around on her own without improvement in the country’s real estate market.
Founder of the Adani Group, Gautam Adani:
Gautam Adani also faced a significant hit to his wealth in early 2023.
In the fall of 2022, the Indian businessman surpassed Jeff Bezos to become the second richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth was estimated at that time to be around
Source: https://www.aol.com/elon-musk-other-9-bosses-110025149.html
Leave a Reply