Who was the best CEO of 2024?

ANOTHER UNEASYAIS&PUCBAI XAIAI AICEOUCBUCBCEOCEOS&PAIS&P year for chief executives is drawing to a close. A series of elections, from India to America, cast a shroud of uncertainty over 2024. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East kept geopolitics front and centre. China’s economy slowed and Europe’s continued to sputter. Excitement over artificial intelligence () was balanced by gnawing questions over the pace of adoption and the rate of further technological advances.For many bosses, though, 2024 was an unambiguous success. For the second year running, has considered which chief executive did best. We have again started by looking at total shareholder returns, relative to industry averages, for listed companies in the 1200, an index made up of the most valuable companies in the world outside China and India. We considered the bosses of the top ten companies from that list (see table).The group is a mixed bunch, leading companies of varying sizes from different industries and geographies. In ascending order of shareholder returns, they are: Jean-Christophe Tellier of , a Belgian biotech firm; Rick Smith of Axon Enterprise, an American maker of body cams and police tasers; Tyler Glover of Texas Pacific Land, a big landowner in the Lone Star State; Geir Haoy of Kongsberg, a Norwegian defence firm; Hirota Yasuhito of Asics, a Japanese peddler of jogging trainers; Izumisawa Seiji of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a Japanese firm which makes power equipment and weapons; Jensen Huang of Nvidia, an chipmaker; Jim Burke of Vistra Corp, a Texas-based power generator; Christian Bruch of Siemens Energy, a German power-equipment company; and Alex Karp of Palantir, an American data-and-analytics firm. (Mr Karp used to sit on the board of ’s parent company.)One name is conspicuously absent: Elon Musk. In hindsight, buddying up with Donald Trump was a strategic masterstroke. The combined value of the six companies of which he is the de facto boss—Tesla, SpaceX, X, , Neuralink and the Boring Company—has risen by about 90% in 2024, with the vast majority of those gains accruing after the American election on November 5th. Although that represents the creation of some $900bn in shareholder value, the increase in percentage terms is not enough to get Mr Musk into our top ten.One striking feature of our list is how fortunate many of these bosses have been. From war to the revolution and the election of Mr Trump, factors beyond their control have sent the value of the companies they run hurtling upwards. We have whittled down our list by excluding three instances where luck, more than skill, seems to have played the dominant role. Both Vistra and Texas Pacific Land have been propelled mostly by expectations that power-hungry data centres will drum up business. Axon has been buoyed by Mr Trump’s victory and his talk of militarising federal law enforcement. (Mr Smith also reportedly presides over a toxic workplace culture where, among other things, employees get tasered. Although the firm says that workers were willing participants in the zapping and safety measures were taken, it is not a great look for a .)We dinged two more bosses because of uncertainty over the durability of their performance. Part of Asics’s recent success is down to Onitsuka Tiger, a shoe brand that has become wildly popular with Gen Z. If sales keep up the pace in 2025, Mr Hirota may have a shot at the podium. For now, though, the company’s growth is too reliant on the whims of faddish TikTokkers. As for , its rise is thanks largely to Bimzelx, a smash-hit anti-inflammatory treatment it launched in America at the end of 2023. Up until then, ’s shares had risen little during Mr Tellier’s tenure, which began in 2015. He will need to prove he is more than a one-trick pony.Two other candidates were bumped off the list because of their past performance. The surge in Siemens Energy’s share price partly reflects its recovery from an abysmal 2023 during which it wrote down the value of its wind-turbine business by $2bn and received a bail-out from the German government. Mr Bruch, who took over as boss in 2020, was dropped from our list as a result. Mr Huang, by contrast, was excluded because his performance in 2023 was too good—so much so that it earned him the honour of being our best that year. Nvidia’s growth in 2024, although still rapid, began to slow, and it is no longer blowing past analysts’ expectations the way it once did.All three remaining bosses could reasonably be awarded the title of the best in 2024. At Kongsberg, Mr Haoy has benefited from rising orders for weapons systems, but can also claim credit for the successful integration of Rolls-Royce Marine, a big and risky acquisition he made in 2019 that helped set the company up for growth. Mr Izumisawa, who will be stepping down in 2025, has transformed Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from a bloated conglomerate focused on fossil-fuel equipment to a streamlined business with strengths in green energy and defence.Among our finalists, however, it is Mr Karp of Palantir who stands out. Over the course of 2024 his company’s market capitalisation has rocketed from $36bn to over $180bn. Its underlying financial performance has been impressive. Palantir is expanding rapidly, with analysts expecting it to notch up revenue growth of 26% in 2024, up ten percentage points from the year before. It has also become much more profitable, with operating margins doubling to 15% in the 12 months to September 2024. In a sign of its ascendancy, Palantir was added to the 500 index of America’s most valuable companies in September.Mr Karp co-founded Palantir in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, with a focus on selling software to help spooks find terrorists. These days it builds whizzy tools to solve tricky problems for a wide range of customers, often pulling and processing masses of data from multiple sources. That might be software to help a factory monitor its production line or a battlefield-intelligence system for an army. Its engineers often work onsite to better understand what their clients need. Generative has given the company an added boost, as customers grapple with how to link the technology with their internal data.The risk for Mr Karp now is that expectations have soared too high. His firm’s forward price-to-earnings ratio, a measure of how richly investors value profits, recently hit 150, far above the average of 22 for firms in the 500. Only 14% of analysts who cover the stock reckon investors should buy it. It has been a stellar year for Mr Karp. The pressure is now on to sustain the momentum.