A cross-industry survey of CEOs conducted by Fortune pinpoints the leaders who they feel receive too much or too little credit.
Fortune surveys CEOs alongside its list of most admired companies, which was released Jan. 31, to rank "which of their peers are overrated and which don't get enough credit."
The most overrated CEO, with 399 votes, is Elon Musk. The 52-year-old CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, formerly Twitter, was also rated the most overrated last year.
Mr. Musk may be the wealthiest person in the world, but the CEO community seems to see disproportionate recognition for his eccentric ideas and aggressive goals compared to his results. In 2023, he talked about self-driving Teslas by the end of the year, plans to build a town, and factory-building on Mars. At the same time, Tesla did roughly double its stock in 2023, but predicted "notably slower" growth on its January earnings call.
Coming in at second most overrated is Bob Iger, boomerang CEO of Disney, the largest global media conglomerate.
Mr. Iger returned to Disney out of retirement in November 2022 with the company renewing his contract this past summer through 2026. The 302 votes from CEOs who see Mr. Iger as overrated are aligned with Disney's fall in the most admired rankings, stumbling from the top 10 for the first time since 2012 to secure the 12th spot. Although Mr. Iger, 72, returned to help steady the company and return it to profitability with about $7.5 billion in cost-cutting, "shares keep falling, declining 9% year over year, and hit a nine-year low in stock price last summer," according to Fortune.
Fortune also seeks guidance from CEOs on who of their peers may be underrated, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella securing that superlative. Mr. Nadella, age 56, has led the company as CEO since 2014 and isn't as widely publicized as his aforementioned peers.
"Last year was a particularly visible one for the CEO, who expanded Microsoft's investment partnership with OpenAI, mediated the firing and rehiring drama of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and closed Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard despite opposition from U.K. and European regulators," Fortune noted.