9. Travis Kalanick
Category of Candidate: Silicon Valley “royalty.”
The logical place to start a CEO hunt for a major tech company would be to look for a candidate who has previously run a major tech company. This narrows our options. But Musk has implied that people won’t be happy about his choice, so we have to consider which tech CEO would annoy people the most. Uber founder Travis Kalanick seems like he’d fit the criteria nicely.
Before Dara Khosrowshahi replaced him at Uber, Kalanick was known for abusing employees, engaging in alleged sexual misconduct, sabotaging workers’ rights, and engaging in shady practices to avoid regulatory scrutiny. These are all qualities that should appeal to Musk but I still don’t think Kalanick should be considered much of a contender.
The Uber founder is just too strong-willed and idiosyncratic in his own right to have any interest in doing Elon’s bidding. Besides, Kalanick seems determined to make a comeback with his cloud kitchen startup.
In a similar vein, WeWork founder Adam Neumann could probably check some boxes but he’s too weird and WeWork went bust.
If Elon wanted to put a woman in charge former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer or former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are available at the moment. I don’t think either would be interested in running Twitter. Both would ask for a lot of money and independence if they did.
