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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

One law we should pass is forbidding C-suites from holding more than one full-time job, unless said job is at some non-profit or just sitting (or chairing) a board.

It really seems like as soon as interest rates rose all of a sudden every "Super CEO"'s business portfolio was in troubled waters.

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Do we need a specific law for this? If it's bad for the companies involved, shouldn't that be something their board take care of? If the directors are failing in their supervisory duty, isn't that something a shareholder lawsuit can address?

It does seem like the fact a CEO can work multiple jobs at the same time undercuts the common argument that we must all return to the office.

If they aren’t giving a company their full attention, then surely that’s seen the companies performance and share price?

Why do we need laws for problems the market will solve?

Where's your evidence that the market has been even attempting to solve the problem of people (such as Musk) holding multiple C-suite positions simultaneously? I've seen no such evidence. If anything it seems to be supporting it, given that Tesla shareholders seem primed to vote on giving Musk 50 billion USD.

If they do a bad job, the stock price drops and they get replaced.

You also are not laying out exhaustive and conclusive evidence that laws are needed for this.

I think your Elon example isn’t good and has more to do with politics than business/economics.

You're the one who claimed the market will solve this problem, the onus is on you to provide evidence for your position. Additionally there are plenty of cases out there of objectively terrible CEOs (Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind) that don't get booted out - it usually takes regulators or even the justice department to deal with it in those cases. Which is exactly what's being proposed.

Did regulators have to wait for a researcher and journalists to get the ball rolling on Theranos?

Sorry if your comment wasn’t the parent that I replied to saying we need more laws without any evidence to support that conclusion.

And now you bring up Holmes.

Why do we need a law? You can choose to invest or not.

I mean, tons of shareholders are literally fighting to give Elon another $50 billion in stock, diluting themselves.

Well, it seems like if I was bullish on tesla and believed their growth story I’d be extremely interested in making sure that elon gets what he wants, because it seems he is basically threatening to gut parts of the company if he doesn’t. Cannot imagine how this is legal or tolerable, but lots of stuff he does I think this is the case and nothing seems to really matter and number go up.

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