Are Two C.E.O.s Better Than One? (Update)

**Stephen Dubner** (0:01)
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Hey there, Stephen Dubner. If you follow business news, you may have noticed an interesting trend. Big companies hiring not one, but two CEOs. It's happening at Spotify, Oracle, Comcast, and elsewhere. Why does this seem to be happening so frequently? Well, one possibility, a slight possibility perhaps, is that all those people have been listening to Freakonomics Radio in an episode that we made a couple years ago called, Are Two CEOs Better Than One? So we thought it might be a good time to revisit that episode, and that's what we're playing for you today as a bonus episode. We have updated facts and figures where necessary. As always, thanks for listening.
People often ask me, where do you get the ideas for your show? And I usually say something like, well, I don't have a real job. This show is all I do, so I spend a lot of time reading, talking to people, wandering around, trying to sort out what's interesting in the world and what's under explored. But occasionally, a good idea just shows up in an email, like the one we received from one Zach Levine of Tampa, Florida. As an entrepreneur who has started and sold several successful tech startups, he wrote, I have always toyed with the idea of having a co-CEO. I shine at most CEO related things, but there are many I'm not great at. So my question for you, do companies run by co-CEOs perform better than those run by solo CEOs? Today on Freakonomics Radio, let's find out. We will hear from one CEO expert who thinks co-CEOs are a great idea and one who thinks it's absurd. We'll hear directly from some co-CEOs, one pair that is happily running a big company and one from a huge company that went down in flames. We'll also hear about some research which found that working in pairs makes people not only more productive, but happier. And who doesn't want to be happier?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:42)
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:56)
Okay, let's start with this man. Name and ID, please.

**Marc Feigen** (4:01)
Marc Feigen. I am a CEO Advisor.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:04)
And what does a CEO Advisor do?

**Marc Feigen** (4:07)
Good question. So we have a firm that supports the CEO with everything they need to be successful. They get a coach, they get governance advice, and Vestor Relations advice.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:19)
Fortune Magazine has called Feigen the CEO Whisperer. People come to him with problems, with questions. Not long ago, there was a question about whether two CEOs might be better than one.

**Marc Feigen** (4:34)
It was in a conversation with a client who was curious about it, and I had probably the same skepticism that anyone else would have, which is that, hey, it's probably difficult to make work. I didn't know offhand of any co-CEOs. And I said, I'll look at it. We looked at 2,200 companies from 1996 to 2020, the S&P 1200 and the Russell 1000, and there were just 95

**Stephen Dubner** (4:59)
That's right. In the case of these 2,200 large publicly traded companies over more than 20 years, so that's a lot more than just 2,200 CEOs, there were just 95 instances of co-CEOs. Some of them ran firms you may know. Chipotle, SAP, and Research In Motion, or RIM, the company that made the BlackBerry, the first big smartphone. But again, co-CEOs were unusual.

**Marc Feigen** (5:27)
Certainly, this is rare in the public markets. Private companies, though, have co-CEOs everywhere you look. If you go to a bakery or a pub, ask if there's a co-CEO in charge. Well, no, we don't have co-CEOs, but my brother and I, we run the place.