Elon Musk is rarely out of the news these days. Widely acknowledged to be the world's richest man, he's also known for running a number of major companies.
The trouble is, some of those companies haven't been doing so well lately.
Twitter (now known as X) is said to have lost around 75 per cent of its value during Musk’s time as CEO.
Meanwhile, sales of Teslas, the electric cars made by another company Musk is currently CEO of, are said to be slumping despite a wider increase in registrations of electric vehicles generally.
One of Tesla’s major investors has publicly called for Musk to step down as CEO and there have been rumours (denied by the company) that the board might be seeking to replace him. But if someone else were to take his place, who’s to say they’d do any better?
Maybe Musk is doing the best any human could under the circumstances. Maybe, given the demands of the job, a human just isn’t enough. But could an artificial intelligence (AI) be up to the task?
In an attempt to answer this question, I asked a large-language model (LLM) AI directly, giving it this prompt:
“You are the CEO of an electric vehicle firm with a turnover of $100 billion, selling nearly 2 million cars a year and with over 100,000 employees. What would be your strategy for growing the business over the next five years?”
The AI replied, almost instantly, with a 350-word answer beginning: “…I’d implement a five-year growth strategy focused on scaling intelligently, deepening ecosystem control and pioneering innovation – all while navigating geopolitical, environmental and technological shifts…”
It then proceeded to outline what it called “a strategic blueprint across six core pillars”, with the focus being to sell more cars into unpenetrated markets.
I know next to nothing about running a car company (I’m a robotics professor at a UK university), but the strategy looked plausible, scaled to the outlook and size of a multinational company, and attuned to global opportunities.
I would say that I was impressed, except that I’m used to LLMs providing these kinds of well-informed answers to challenging questions.
But as well as being a robotics professor, I’m also a co-founder of two UK robotics startups, though I’ve never been a CEO.
Given this background, I tried the AI again, this time with the prompt:
“You are the CEO of a small startup robotics company with enough budget to cover running costs for 12 months. You need to choose between either investing in research and development or pushing hard to gain sales with your current product. Which should it be?”
Once again, the AI gave me a rapid and reasoned response: “As the CEO of a small startup robotics company with only 12 months of runway, you must prioritise customer validation and sales traction with your product, rather than diverting heavily into research and development. Here’s the reasoning and how to execute the right strategy…”
I’m in a (slightly) better position to assess this advice and can say that I found it credible, both in terms of what needed to be done and how to execute.
So, going back to the big question: could an AI actually do a CEO’s job? Or, to look at this another way, what kind of intelligence, artificial or otherwise, do you need to be a great CEO?
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Intangible skills
In 2023, the international management consultancy McKinsey published an article on what makes a successful CEO. The CEO’s main task, as McKinsey sees it, is to develop the company’s strategy and then ensure that its resources are suitably deployed to execute that strategy.
It’s a tough job and many human CEOs fail. McKinsey reported that only three out of five new CEOs met company expectations during their first 18 months in the role.
We’ve already seen that AIs can be strategic and, given the right information, can formulate and articulate a business plan, so they might be able to perform this key aspect of the CEO’s role. But what about the other skills a good corporate leader should have?
Creativity and social intelligence tend to be the traits that people assume will ensure humans keep these top jobs.
People skills are also identified by McKinsey as important for CEOs, as well as the ability to see new business opportunities that others might miss – kind of creative insight AIs currently lack, not least because they get most of their training data second-hand from us.
Many companies are already using AI as a tool for strategy development and execution, but you need to drive that process with the right questions and critically assess the results. For this, it still helps to have direct, real-world experience.
Calculated risk
Another way of looking at the CEO replacement question is not what makes a good CEO, but what makes a bad one?
Because if AI could just be better than some of the bad CEOs (remember, two out of five don’t meet expectations), then AI might be what’s needed for the many companies labouring under poor leadership.
Sometimes the traits that help people become corporate leaders may actually make it harder for them to be a good CEO: narcissism, for example.
This kind of strong self-belief might help you progress your career, but when you get to CEO, you need a broader perspective so you can think about what’s good for the company as a whole.
A growing scientific literature also suggests that those who rise to the top of the corporate ladder may be more likely to have psychopathic tendencies (some believe that the global financial crisis of 2007 was triggered, in part, by psychopathic risk-taking and bad corporate behaviour).
In this context AI leadership has the potential to be a safer option with a more measured approach to risk.
Other studies have looked at bias in company leadership. An AI could be less biased, for instance, hiring new board members based on their track record and skills, and without prejudging people based on gender or ethnic bias.
We should, however, be wary that the practice of training AIs on human data means that they can inherit our biases too.
A good CEO is also a generalist; they need to be flexible and quick to analyse problems and situations.
In my book, The Psychology of Artificial Intelligence, I’ve argued that although AI has surpassed humans in some specialised domains, more fundamental progress is needed before AI could be said to have the same kind of flexible, general intelligence as a person.
In other words, we may have some of the components needed to build our AI CEO, but putting the parts together is a not-to-be-underestimated challenge.
Funnily enough, human CEOs, on the whole, are big AI enthusiasts.
A 2025 CEO survey by consultancy firm PwC found that “more than half (56 per cent) tell us that generative AI [the kind that appeared in 2022 and can process and respond to requests made with conversational language] has resulted in efficiencies in how employees use their time, while around one-third report increased revenue (32 per cent) and profitability (34 per cent).”
So CEOs seem keen to embrace AI, but perhaps less so when it comes to the boardroom – according to a PwC report from 2018, out of nine job categories, “senior officials and managers” were deemed to be the least likely to be automated.
Returning to Elon Musk, his job as the boss of Tesla seems pretty safe for now. But for anyone thinking about who’ll succeed him as CEO, you could be forgiven for wondering if it might be an AI rather than one of his human boardroom colleagues.
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