Elon Musk livened up the staid world of corporate job titles this week by crowning himself “technoking of Tesla”. He handed his chief financial officer the Game of Thrones-style title “master of coin”.
Is this, as one analyst asked, Tesla’s way of signalling that it is a tech company rather than a car company? It seems unlikely. The chief executives of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet are not called technokings. The more plausible explanation is that Musk is amusing himself and his retail fans at the expense of the stiffs at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Weird job titles abound in tech, a sector in which eccentric behaviour is applauded. Until Musk, however, the practice appeared to be dwindling. AOL appointed David Shing, aka Shingy, “digital prophet” in summer 2011. Microblogging site Tumblr hired a “fashion evangelist” in 2012 — the same year Jeff Barr became “chief evangelist” of Amazon’s AWS.
Odd job titles can be empty PR — think of Apple dubbing in-store workers “geniuses” or Automattic calling its customer support “happiness engineers”. They do not tend to correspond to unusual jobs. Evangelists usually work in marketing. Ninjas toil in software engineering. Musk’s job as chief executive will not change now he is technoking.
Instead, funny job titles signal entitlement. They show that bosses feel they have the full backing of investors. Musk’s new job name comes after Tesla’s share price grew more than 660 per cent in the space of a year.
Executives who feel under pressure do not have time to mess around with the description of what they do. They are desperately clinging on to posts such as chief executive officer and chief financial officer whose currency — unlike technoking — is universal. Jokey names are a bad look when you are losing investors money.
A boss emboldened to embrace a daft job description or hand them out may make increasingly risky bets. Musk’s new title follows Tesla’s decision to invest $1.5bn in notoriously volatile cryptocurrency bitcoin. Shing’s 2011 appointment followed AOL’s vast purchase of The Huffington Post. One month later, losses triggered a 30 per cent share price drop.
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