[tombert]

I broadly agree, though then the argument would be "well the best CEOs would go to for-profit places", and we might get worse CEOs leading the non-profits; if we had the non-profit pay for-profit wages, then they might be more appealing to more talented people.

I'm not sure I actually agree with this argument, to be clear. I don't even know that I think the CEO does all that much; Elon Musk is the CEO of like three or four companies while also leading a government agency, indicating to me that "CEO" is not a difficult job, so I don't know that we necessarily need "the best" CEO anyway.

[RobotToaster]

We would probably be better off with non-profits run by non-profit oriented CEOs.

[hagbard_c]

People like Musk, Jobs, Edison and others are valuable because they see future possibilities - not pipe dreams but real possibilities - and turn their attention towards realising those goals by putting together teams of people who stand a chance to get there. Some of them - Musk and Edison in this list - do some of the work themselves, others - Jobs - are more 'visionary leaders' who somehow manage to inspire or scare others towards achieving the goal. Once the company is up and running these types of leaders tend to look elsewhere to break new ground because the day-to-day grind of running those companies is not their thing.

Mozilla does not need to find future possibilities, it got its goals handed to it by Marc Andreessen via Netscape: create and maintain a browser. The task of a non-profit CEO is to make sure the company remains funded. This takes a different type of person, someone who has or manages to create contacts within places where money is to be found. The last series of Mozilla CEOs saw this differently, these women convinced themselves that they were there to 'change the world' by means of pushing ideologically loaded programs and propaganda onto it. They considered the true reason for being of their organisation - create and maintain a browser which competes against the duopoly by giving control back to the user - no more than a means to get the funding for their ideological crusade. They also increased their own piece of the pie markedly in the process in some strange realisation of Orwell's All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than the others quote.

[mossTechnician]

Elon Musk personifies the CEO who doesn't develop things (he infamously did not found Tesla, but purchased the right to say he did). Musk has used his power to push his personal and political ideologies on the world. I've never seen any other human receive more attention than the president of the United States during the president's first interview. Musk owns, runs and censors the "de facto public town square" as he sees fit.

You can criticize Mozilla's "women" for being political, but Elon Musk is the most politically active and powerful CEO in the world, possibly of all time.

[hagbard_c]

From what I understand Musk sees/saw Tesla as a vehicle (no pun intended) to fund his real purpose, that being "working towards becoming a multi-planetary species". Whether you consider this to be a sensible or achievable goal is not really relevant but it does seem to be his driving goal. From what I gather in older interviews with him and people around him he was involved in the design of the Tesla Roadster and model S as well as in the design of the Falcon 1. It is difficult to find, let alone put any trust in objective material concerning Musk since he's been designated undesirable #2 (and more recently #1) by those who see him as the one who opened up what they considered to be their playground - Twitter - to the 'deplorables' and 'bitter clingers'. This, by the way, is another reason to compare him to Edison who also had and has a polarising effect with some people seeing him as a true innovator while others see him as an egotistical businessman who was intent on stealing others' credit for personal profit and who wielded patents as weapons to keep out superior competition in the form of (Nikolai Tesla's) AC power networks.