DQ1

You will use the model you created and uploaded in week two as the focus of the discussion in this reflective post. Your initial post must include the upload of your submission from week two. Then, provide at least Two subsequent posts to provide peer reviews of other students’ models. CLASS: When responding to each other with this DQ, please go beyond giving kudos. Make your responses to each other as substantive suggestions, questions, comments, or insights gleaned by what each other has created. Be constructive. [No citation/references required]

First person is acceptable.

DQ2

What is a corporate sustainability strategy and have your senior leaders provided one for your organization? 

(If not sure if your senior leaders have provided a corporate sustainability strategy, please ask your supervisor or others who might know.)

DQ3

In this week’s reading, in the book “Breaking Away” on pages 105 & 106, in Table 6.1, there is a listing of Key Leadership Characteristics. 

Which of the 13 characteristics do you believe you are in need of developing to a greater extent, and why? And, if it is important enough to you, what will you actually do so that in 12-months from today, you are actually better in that area?

DQ4

Does your organization have a formal employee succession plan to identify and develop talented employees as part of its corporate sustainability program? 

And, do you have your own set plan to develop your career or do you just wing-it hoping for the best?

R1

Musk famously controls and/or holds sway over a family of companies, including two giant disruptors: Tesla (TSLA), and SpaceX, as well as The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI. Then there are subsidiary companies — for instance Starlink in the case of SpaceX and Tesla Energy in the case of Tesla. Consider too, the additional companies Musk helped found and or invested in which include, Zip2, (bought by Compaq — which was bought by HP), PayPal, and DeepMind (bought by Google), and the companies founded by employees who’ve left these endeavors.

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SpaceX, privately held, is worth over $100 billion, (up from $74 billion a year ago), according to Crunchbase, a rare centicorn (or is it hectocorn), behind China’s ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and China’s Ant Group as the most valuable private company on the planet. Tesla is now worth over $1 trillion, up from $34 billion three years ago. (That’s 23X!)

“All I can say about the human being himself is in terms of all his moves — they have been either validated or haven’t been proven wrong,” says Philippe Houchois, Tesla analyst at Jefferies of Musk.

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“Elon Musk was wrongly written off by a lot of the corporate community for his clownish behavior that was such a big distraction,” adds Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University.

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Those lofty valuations don’t begin to speak to the import and impact of Tesla and SpaceX. How do you value leading the entire world’s transportation industry away from fossil fuels and into the electric age? Or accelerating exploration and perhaps colonization of space while along the way perhaps providing reliable internet for the world?

This one’s easy. Elon Musk, 50 years old, is the richest person in the world, now worth $276 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $87 billion richer than No. 2 on the list, Jeff Bezos. Musk is richer than Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott put together, richer than all the Walton family members put together. Statista estimates “the average U.S. resident would need to work 3 million years at the average annual wage of $69,392” to accrue Musk’s fortune. (Better get cracking!)

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Note too, that Musk is the nation’s most popular billionaire, according to Vox, with 50% surveyed saying they had a favorable opinion — equal Democrats and Republicans, btw — and “a staggering” 66% of men viewing him favorably.

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When looking at the other top billionaires — Gates, Page, Arnault and Buffett — who would you bet has the most upside going forward? That speaks to this recent study on Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. The methodology, which looks to be some sort of extrapolation, suggests that Musk will get there in 24 months. (We’ll check back.)

Agency

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As I’m sure you saw this week, Musk revealed he bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter (making him the company’s largest shareholder) which sent the stock soaring and netting him over half a billion dollars. Musk, who will serve on the company’s board, at first said he was a passive investor, then changed it to active. (SEC rules are such a bother, right?)

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Twitter (TWTR) is Musk’s means to communicate with his 80.7 million followers, (he got 4.4 million to vote “yes” or “no” on whether the platform should have an edit function). Musk uses Twitter to disintermediate the media, which makes sense because he has 10X the viewership of “60 Minutes” or 20X Wall Street Journal subscribers, though his position in Twitter may not be the boon the market seems to think.

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Musk relishes locking horns with other global alpha-males, such as Bezos (rival space endeavors), Joe Biden (unions) and Putin (Ukraine.) Obama and Trump not so much, though I bet Musk got a kick out of this recent headline: “Twitter Stock Explodes As Elon Musk Invests; Donald Trump SPAC Plummets”

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Each morning at Yahoo Finance we have a newsroom meeting. Musk and his companies come up almost every single day, sometimes more than once (yesterday it was the Austin “cyber rodeo” grand opening). Same for newsrooms across the world too. No other person matches that.

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Last December I went to NASDAQ headquarters in Times Square where Musk was named Time Magazine’s person of the year. (I actually ran into him in a hallway and exchanged pleasantries.) Musk’s fashion-model mother Maye was there (said hi to her as well), as well as Musk’s then 18-month-old son X, who was very well behaved and stole the show.

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Musk talked about his vision for space: “The point of SpaceX is to help make humanity a spacefaring civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species so as to expand the scope and scale of consciousness and ultimately better understand what questions to ask about the answer which is the universe.” Whoa. Not small stuff there.

R2

Class,

Week One allowed us to take a look from the inside of how our companies or organizations are able to function and produce the products to consumers. From a military standpoint the assignment opened up my eyes on how many key assets and partners we had to ensure the proper training of Soldiers. I work in a section of three Non-Commissioned Officers and one Warrant Officer who run the whole school together. With such a small number we depend greatly on the civilians in the building and across base to keep the program alive and develop the materials. While I knew this, I never realized how dependent the school was on outside resources. This change of perspective will allow me to attempt to strengthen the bond we have with the civilians that we work with as the work relation will remain crucial to our success as a combined team. 

The model also allowed me to see why filling slots for the courses is so vital to our mission. The more students we push through the school, the more funding we will receive to update our equipment, and pay the supporting personnel that we require. When we lose funding, team members will be let go, thus creating more work for everyone involved. With a greater workload and demand of people morale can fall and have a devastating effect.