When Spotify announced its largest-ever round of layoffs in December, CEO Daniel Ek hailed a new age of efficiency at the streaming giant. But four months on, it seems he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be.
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
However, the company failed to hit its guidance on profitability and monthly active user growth.
Edit: Thanks to @[email protected] for the paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/wdyDS
People keep trying to paint every CEO as this smart and hardworking class of people. We continue to see it isn’t true.
There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.
Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.
Good CEOs are bad for short term profits because they’re more interested in keeping their company alive longterm.
Once a company is publicly traded it can easily pervert the incentives so that the goal of the CEO becomes to enrich the investors as quickly as possible even at the expense of long term benefit, because stock price and investor satisfaction become the factors contributing most to executive compensation. A CEO who doesn’t care about maximizing their own compensation in favor of employee welfare or company long term success doesn’t keep the support of investors for very long either.
well ya, the very nature of the shareholder system demands short term profits, the rug pull has become the industry norm, dismantle the company to make your numbers seem better, inflating value, and sell before it collapses, find your next
victim“investment opportunity” and repeatOr they often leave on their own accord. Eg Steve Wozniak
At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it’s a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.
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Daniel Ek founded the company. He got to where he’s at by having lots of money. He got that money to found Spotify by being hired into other companies which were acquired. You’re describing “Executive Vice Presidents” that were promoted from within.
You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there’s just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don’t know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.
That’s not to say that workers aren’t necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.
People tend to hero worship others who don’t deserve to be.
Who’s doing that? The only people doing that to the CEOs everyone else knows they’re useless.