Musk Chose Who Got Chips
Musk empire governance, OpenAI governance, Roaring Kitty’s E*Trade account, NYSE glitches, synthetic PIK fees, Peter Orszag’s office and a violin token.
If you are the chief executive officer and controlling shareholder of two different companies, each with different minority shareholders and employees, and they both use the same essential scarce inputs, and the sole supplier of those inputs calls you up and says “we are backed up and can only meet the needs of one of your companies, which one should get the inputs and which should go without,” what should you do?
The extremely obvious answer is that you should not be the CEO and controlling shareholder of two different companies that compete for the same inputs! There is not a good answer! You can’t, like, put this problem into the Good Governance Machine and have it come out clean. The problem is that you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of one company to put their interests first, and you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of the other company to put their interests first, and you cannot do both. This is why one person is not usually the CEO of two different companies that compete with each other, and, when someone is, people get mad at him all the time.