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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction. I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO.

It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.

As a lowly high income IC, I am prohibited from almost any outside business activity and in some cases forced to divest when joining a new firm. Somehow the guy running the company who has actual ability to make conflicted decisions is allowed to moonlight? Fabulous.

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Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes.

Buffet/Munger seems to be the biggest exception to the trend.

If anything, Buffett/Munger proves the rule: on the org chart, there's no question that Munger reports to Buffett. In practice Buffett isn't trying to call shots day to day, so Munger is functionally in charge of the org, and when he succeeds to the Chairman & CEO title, nothing will really change, but the fact that he's not fighting for a Co-CEO title is a positive sign.

Munger is 99 years old, he's 7 years older than Buffett. They have been partners for almost 50 years. He's not going to succeed anyone!

> Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction. I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO

Don’t VC’s generally prefer that a startup has co-founders? Having such a team mate fosters better decisions, acts as cheerleader when one person is feeling down, etc.

I don’t see a material difference between that and having a co-CEO setup…

What do you think?

VC also strongly suggests that it is made clear one person is the CEO, so when push comes shove, some one can make a decision and things can be resolved. I remembered reading it is better to have 51/49 rather than 50/50 equity for that reason. Though to be honest I am not sure if I read that in the “good advices you should follow” or the “shitty toxic advices you should avoid”. Hard to differentiate sometimes.

Even with co-founders, one of you is still the CEO.

You need an executive function to set direction and unblock stupid territory squabbles. Someone whose decisions are final. If you have two actual CEOs, you don’t have that.

Someone has to be 51+% either way..

HBR has an interesting, recent article about why, in some cases, it might be better to have two CEOs: https://hbr.org/2022/07/is-it-time-to-consider-co-ceos

Good read.

The one time I've seen this situation has been as a board member of a small non-profit. This was ages ago but, as I recall, there were two well-qualified candidates for an editor-in-chief position. It seemed a case where if we appointed one, the other would walk. So we made them co-editors and it didn't go well.

But I can imagine circumstances when it can work with the right people and circumstances.

Exactly.. probably instead of ending up with 1 happy person and the other walking, you ended up with 2 unhappy people and both eventually walking!

> It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.

That amount is, I think, only applicable to Elon Musk and it looks like this is going to crash sooner or later anyway - the big Tesla investors are all furious about how much wealth Elon's shitposting has cost them and I would not be surprised if they threaten him with the choice of continuing to tweet or getting ousted. In any case, even he was a paper-only CEO at SpaceX anyway, Gwynne Shotwell has run the ship for years now.

Sure, and Jack Dorsey was Block/Square & Twitter at same time and we see how that worked out. Also Bluesky which is like a Decentralized Twitter, the thing he just helped sell to Elon? All while being a big BTC pumper..

So, I think you can replace "4" with "N where N>1"

I too am wondering why Elon is only running a single digit count of companies. Think of how much faster the singularity would arrive if he was running 10+ corporations!

> Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction

It's actually worked quite well at Oracle over the decades.

Benioff, who is former Oracle, hasn't perfected it like Larry has.

Every rule has an exception, and maybe Larry has perfected something there or has a very well managed ego.

Most Co-head situations I see are either higher-ups setting up a power struggle between 2 newly appointed co-heads, or an existing head pretending to step back by appointing someone as their co-head who they can sabotage in real-time.

I wonder if the dynamic is simply ownership.

Larry is still the largest single stockholder of Oracle (~27%). So everyone knows he still runs the company at the end of the day.

Benioff only owns ~2% of Salesforce. There's institutional investors who own more of Salesforce than even Marc.

Another fun example is Deutsche Bank.

Their first non-German leader (Anshu Jain, who didn't speak German) was made Co-CEO with an older German hand Jürgen Fitschen from the board.

They pushed out Jain after 3 years, brought in a Brit John Cryan (who spoke German!) to co-CEO with Fitschen. Fitschen stayed on another year after which they finally let the non-German, Cryan run the place as sole CEO for 2 years before replacing him with another German as sole CEO.

So in total there were 4 years of non-German co-CEOing with a German, 2 years of a non-German actually being sole CEO, and then back to a German again like the rest of their 153 year history.

SAP tried the co-CEO thing but Jennifer Morgan was gone in a year - suspect her not being based in Waldorf or familiar with Hasso.

Uhh, Oracle is the obvious counter example. They've had co-CEOs and their stock is on fire right now.

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