I’m surprised how many major CEOs have no presence on LinkedIn.
I was reminded of that in December when David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group and majority owner of the Baltimore Orioles, announced he was joining.
He posted a video joking he might be the last one on the planet without a LinkedIn page.
In fact, there is a fairly long list of prominent business people with no listing on the platform.
Some aren’t a surprise. Elon Musk, for example, as the owner of X, a major competitor, would have no motivation to join. And Warren Buffett, who just retired from Berkshire Hathaway, has emphasized communicating via letters to shareholders.
But there are others for whom the decision not to participate seems like it would have to have been intentional. It seems impossible their PR teams didn’t at least think of setting up a presence on the platform. So someone would have had to make an active decision not to.
Here is a short — but not comprehensive list – of some of the executives who don’t have listings:
Jeff Bezos – Amazon
Alex Karp – Palantir
Sam Altman – OpenAI
Ted Pick – Morgan Stanely
Jack Dorsey – Square
Larry Page – Google
Sergey Brin – Google
Tim Cook – Apple
Bob Iger – Disney
I can think of some reasons why they don’t, but I’m curious what you think.
Why did they make that decision?