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Teachers are paid so poorly in the US that one in five has a second job. Silicon Valley firms, such as Uber and Airbnb, feed off and fuel this demand for an additional income. However, it is less obvious why leaders in that same technology sector feel the need for their own “side hustle”.
It is certainly not the money. Teachers are looking to supplement a salary that might be $30,000. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, earns that in a couple of days. And that is without considering his $5bn slice of the $115bn software company he created.
But Mr Benioff has several side hustles. He has just bought Time magazine for $190m. He has aspirations in both global and local policymaking, chairing the tech offshoot of the World Economic Forum and fighting homelessness in San Francisco. At the same time, he runs a company that employs 33,000 people and adds new staff at a rate of 20 per cent a year, while splashing billions of dollars on acquisitions and trying to maintain spectacular sales growth.
Managing that business would be, to most of the world’s executives, an all-consuming task. Yet today’s tech set seems unwilling to be tied down.
Larry Page, chief executive of Alphabet, the parent of Google, is spending more time on his private Caribbean island, Bloomberg reported this month. He was flagrantly absent from a congressional hearing, which left an empty chair in his dishonour, and is reported to duck management tasks. His side hustles include a whole fleet of flying car companies. To all appearances, he finds the search engine he co-founded, which changed the world and made his fortune, boring.
That is not the accusation levelled at Elon Musk, whose problem seems to be a lack of delegation. Asked on an investor call in 2012 how he could run both Tesla, the electric car pioneer, and SpaceX, whose rockets blast satellites into orbit, he explained: “I’m on email a lot . . . and that’s really helpful to be able to run both companies simultaneously. And then I guess when I’m with my kids, when they don’t need my direct attention, then I’m on email as well. That’s kind of how it works.”
I’m on email a lot, especially when my kids need my direct attention, but I still struggle to do one job. And this is not quite the whole story. Mr Musk may well — as he likes to humblebrag — sometimes sleep on the factory floor, but he also finds time for destructive Twitter tirades and fanciful attempts to save children from caves.
The chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is not only an enabler of CEO distraction but a practitioner: alongside his $22bn social media company he also runs Square, a $35bn digital payments company.
This cohort of tech entrepreneurs seems to have avoided the Ritalin that was pumped into a generation of American schoolchildren to combat attention deficit disorder. But we are probably lucky that they are so afflicted: imaginative leaps are the hallmark of these creative geniuses, who have rebuilt the tech sector since the dotcom collapse. When it comes to managing the giants they spawned, however, they seem to lose focus.
It has not always been like this. Andy Grove, founder of Intel, enjoyed managing so much that his side hustle was writing books on the subject. He not only revolutionised semiconductors but also mastered the art of the performance review. In the foreword to the paperback edition of Mr Grove’s 1983 manual High Output Management, Ben Horowitz, co-head of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, writes that he and his generation of tech founders would devour the book and then pass it around. “It amazed all of us that the CEO of Intel had taken the time to teach us the essential skill of entrepreneurship: how to manage.”
With significant shareholdings often buttressed by super voting rights, tech CEOs can choose how to run their companies: hands on, hands off or hands all over the place. From the outside, their hubris and dreams of outer space are at worst entertaining, at best inspiring. And should they get sucked into the magazine business, soar off forever to Mars, or never come back from their island, we would be the poorer for it.
For investors and employees, though, the divided attention can be worrisome. It is not nice to feel you are part of the bit that bores the leader, while they take their thrills from the hustle on the side.
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