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’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.
Ek’s power at Spotify, by the digits
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
Quotable: Maybe it’s more about persona than power
“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’s value has.