Adidas’s CEO may have just handed out his phone number to 60,000 employees, but someone you probably won’t catch doing that is Spotify $SPOT’s Daniel Ek.
Daniel Ek said he's one of the least powerful people at the streaming giant — but the numbers tell a different story
Adidas’s CEO may have just handed out his phone number to 60,000 employees, but someone you probably won’t catch doing that is Spotify $SPOT’s Daniel Ek.
“I’m probably the least powerful person in Spotify and I probably make the least amount of decisions in Spotify,” the co-founder and CEO of the Swedish music streaming company said during a live recording of the “In Good Company” podcast in Oslo on Jan. 9.
He credited this outlook to the Scandinavian leadership model, which he said levels out decision-making duties across an organization’s managers. He specially called out assistants as being important players that are often overlooked.
The sentiment is nice, but the numbers from Spotify tell a different story about how much power Ek actually has.
32 million: Spotify shares Ek holds, making him the company’s largest shareholder
$64 million: What Ek made from selling 400,000 shares in October 2023
1,500: People laid off by Spotify in December 2023
<$0.005: What artists make per stream, on average, on Spotify
“I often hear the phrase ‘you should go directly to the CEO’… where a lot of people think that you’re magically going to be able to enact some kind of decision.” —Daniel Ek during a live recording of the “In Good Company” podcast on Jan. 9.
Who is someone who might think they’re the one pulling those puppet strings more than a leader like Ek? Ek named the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as one example, according to Fortune. Maybe Ek is on to something—it’s undeniable that Musk’s persona as a hardcore leader hasn’t tarnished—even if X $TWTR’s value has.
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