CEOs really seem to hate being CEOs

• "Being a CEO sucks," according to Emad Mostaque, the former CEO of Stability AI.
• Exits among leaders of US companies jumped 28% in February to the highest monthly total since 2002.
• CEOs like Elon Musk and Airbnb's Brian Chesky have publicly shared their struggles with the role.

Maybe Emad Mostaque's next job could be CEO whisperer.

Mostaque recently gave up running Stability AI, the company he founded that makes the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. And he has thoughts.

"Being a CEO sucks," Mostaque told a New York Times reporter after stepping down in March.

Mostaque has faced criticism for his management of Stability AI. But he isn't alone in dunking on the role of el jefe. According to the Times, he pointed to complaints Elon Musk has made about being in charge. Musk has said several times it's not his jam. Musk, the Swiss Army knife of CEOs, has endorsed a friend's assessment that being the top dog can be like "looking into the abyss and chewing glass."

Ouch. Let's hope the job comes with dental.

It's not like running a company was ever easy. Yet after a bruising few years navigating a pandemic, snarled supply chains, fights over the culture-war acronyms DEI and ESG, and grappling with restive workers, more corporate chiefs are hitting the eject button — or being told to.

In February, CEO changes at US companies jumped to 248, a 28% increase from the prior month and a nearly 50% surge from the year before, according to the staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The number of CEOs calling it quits in February was the highest monthly total since Challenger began tracking leadership turnover in 2002.

"They are experiencing more of a challenge now, on average, and feeling it more than they were previously," Kevin Kelley, global lead for organization effectiveness and efficiency at Boston Consulting Group, told Business Insider, referring to the CEOs he speaks to.

Leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates offered a similar assessment in a recent report on CEO turnover: "The challenges CEOs must now address have multiplied considerably, including achieving net zero, high inflation, ongoing supply chain issues, and the possibility of restructuring given the uncertain economic outlook."

'Running companies hurts my heart'

Hearing from some chiefs who know what it's like to grind through whack-a-mole days, it's not hard to figure out why they'd leave — or at least want to.

Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, wrote on X in January that starting a company wasn't what made him feel isolated — running it was.

"For me, being a founder wasn't lonely (I had two great co-founders). However, the depths of loneliness I experienced as a CEO are difficult to put into words," Chesky wrote.

Or take Musk: He holds the title of CEO at Tesla and SpaceX and has said he never wanted to be in charge of the carmaker or any company. In 2021, Musk said he'd like to be creating — not running things.

"I rather hate it, and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering, which is what intrinsically I like doing," he said. More recently, in 2022, Musk wrote on X, "Running companies hurts my heart, but I don't see any other way to bring technology & design to fruition."

In 2016, after his first five years in charge of Apple, Tim Cook told The Washington Post that being at the top can indeed be lonely. He recognized that his was still a privileged spot, saying, "I'm not looking for any sympathy. CEOs don't need any sympathy."

There's an old line that CEO stands for "chief everything officer." Makes sense. It's a big job with ultimate responsibility over, well, everything at a company. That might sound great to some ambitious execs. And, of course, the money at the top can be bananas — often hundreds of times what the everyday employee pulls in. In the UK, one recent analysis showed that the typical CEO of a top company was set to take home more in the first four days of 2024 than the average worker would earn all year.

Yet, despite the often-lavish pay, being the proverbial buck-stopper can be exhausting. Jensen Huang, the cofounder of Nvidia, has seen his wealth mushroom as demand for the company's AI-enabling chips soars, but he has said he wouldn't start a company again.

"At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you're going to feel, and the challenges that you're going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, the list of all the things that go wrong, I don't think anybody would start a company," he said on an episode of the tech podcast "Acquired" last year. "Nobody in their right mind would do it."

Granted, starting a company isn't the same thing as running one. But in the early days, founders are most likely to be chief everything officers.

The right time for a change

Of course, not all — or even most — of the recent CEO departures are necessarily voluntary.

The flurry of exits appears to reflect several factors, Andy Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told BI.

In part, it's because there is a bit more clarity about the economy and the state of the world than there was in the early days of the pandemic. That might make it easier for leaders who'd hoped to get their companies through choppy waters to step away.

Another strong US jobs report on Friday showed that many employers continued to snap up workers in March. Market watchers expect the Federal Reserve will start to trim interest rates this year, which could benefit businesses and boost dealmaking.

"Both companies and leaders were loathe to jump ship in the middle of a real crisis," Challenger said. He added that the CEO role could be considered more public-facing than ever. That can up the chances that companies will churn through top execs faster.

Economic tailwinds such as the job numbers and the expectation of rate cuts might make it easier for burned-out leaders — or the boards that hire and fire them — to make a change. So far this year, about 21% of CEOs stepping down have done so to retire, according to the Challenger data.

"It was so unclear what the post-COVID world was going to look like," Challenger said. Now, he added, more companies are saying, "We need to put new strategies in place, and we're going to bring new leaders in to get that done."

Of course, there will always be people who want to climb into leadership. Yet, not everyone is game. In a January survey from Empower involving about 1,100 adult US workers, only three in 10 said they hoped to make it to the C-suite.

CEOs are departing sooner

The time some US CEOs are sticking around has slipped. The median tenure for heads of S&P 500 companies dropped from 6 years in 2013 to 4.8 in 2022, according to one review of CEO longevity.

BCG's Kelley said one reason CEOs are CEOs is because they can balance short-term and long-term time horizons. But the pandemic — and all that got jumbled as a result — made that trickier to pull off, he said.

"There has obviously been substantial uncertainty — four or five years of disruptions where what was envisioned for the coming year turned out not to be the things that needed to be addressed," Kelley said. "That has actually made it harder."