Elon Musk Ranked America’s Most Overrated CEO

Whether it is the trips to space, forcing employees to move to another state, or implanting chips in brains to connect them to a phone, the public has decided that Elon Musk is the most overrated CEO.

Receiving 399 votes this year, Musk earning this title might not be shocking to hear. The CEO had a busy year of running multiple companies, which is an impressive feat. Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly known as Twitter, are all under the Musk umbrella.

While Musk was once idolized as a superhero for revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry with Tesla, he quickly became a villain to many people.

Maybe the dislike of Musk started with his presence on social media–the killer of most outspoken individuals. While many liked his unfiltered communication style, his messages started to cause controversies.

Musk is a massive advocate for free speech and has expressed concerns about censorship on X, formerly known as Twitter. He wants to make X a platform for “free speech around the globe,” believing it’s “a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” (via Popular Mechanics).

Instead of creating his own social media platform (like Donald Trump did with Truth Social), Musk purchased Twitter for $43 billion, according to a security filing, which was 38% above where the price stood a day before Musk’s investment in Twitter became public.

Musk’s ownership of Twitter became an even bigger subject after he removed the blue check marks, and then made those check marks available through payment—which backfired, as many people made fake accounts posing as real people writing problematic statements.

Then, there was the ill-fated cage match between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was building Threads, Meta’s version of Twitter, that would become a competitor to Twitter. Musk initiated the idea of fighting Zuckerberg after discovering he was creating competition.

In November 2023, the SpaceX Starship spacecraft was launched into space but exploded after climbing 39 km toward space. The highly-anticipated test flight was part of a $3 billion project to put humans back on the moon.

Remember when we mentioned that Musk was putting artificial intelligence chips into people’s brains? The project known as Neuralink is another ambitious project by Musk that could transform human-AI interaction.

While Musk took home the most votes this year for Most Overrated CEO, Disney CEO Bob Iger came in second place with 302. Musk has called out Iger before after Disney pulled its advertising revenue from X earlier this year, even going as far as to remove Disney+ from Tesla vehicles.

While CEOs can anger people with their ambitious moves that tend to affect the masses or neglect them entirely, these are people who have worked their way into power. How we feel about it at the end of the day is just gossip to them.