Meta Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz: Why CEO Life is Exhausting

Being a CEO comes with endless responsibilities, from leading teams and managing crises to making decisions that shape an entire company’s future. 

For Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, that weight eventually became “exhausting”.

After 13 years leading work management software company Asana, the Meta co-founder has stepped back from the top job, citing the personal toll that came with the role. 

Speaking on The Stratechery Podcast with Ben Thompson, Dustin reflected openly on why leading a company proved so draining, particularly for someone with an introverted personality.

Dustin said during the episode: “I don’t like to manage teams, and it wasn’t my intention when we started Asana.

“I’d intended to be more of an independent or head of engineering or something again. Then one thing led to another and I was CEO for 13 years and I just found it quite exhausting.”

He added that the pressures of leadership only intensified as the world around him grew more unpredictable: “I’m an introvert, I had to just kind of put on this face day after day and then in the beginning I was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to get easier, the company will get more mature,’ and then the world just kept getting more chaotic - the first Trump presidency and the pandemic and all the race stuff, it made it just a lot less of the company building, being a CEO is a lot more reacting to problems and doing this sort of thing.”

Dustin’s leadership journey 

According to Asana, Dustin announced his departure as CEO in March 2025, transitioning into the role of chairman.

At the time he said in a statement: “As I reflect on my journey since co-founding Asana nearly 17 years ago, I’m filled with immense gratitude.

“Creating and leading Asana has been more than just building a company, it’s been a profound privilege to work alongside some of the most talented minds in the industry to build a platform that is trusted by over 85% of Fortune 500 companies today.”

Founded in 2008, Asana helped pioneer the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model - a way of delivering software over the internet rather than as a one-time purchase or download - and product-led marketing, becoming a leading platform for team collaboration before going public in 2020.

Before creating Asana, Dustin co-founded Facebook in 2004 alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum while studying at Harvard. 

As Facebook’s first Chief Technology Officer and later Vice President of Engineering, he played a crucial role in scaling the platform in its early years before leaving in 2008.

The weight of leadership

Dustin, who is worth US$12bn according to Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, is not the only CEO who is not so keen on the role.

In a post on LinkedIn at the start of 2024, Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared his feelings on the switch from co-founding a start-up to being in charge of a company valued at over US$70m.

Brian posted on X: “For me, being a founder wasn’t lonely”, acknowledging he had two “great” co-founders, but “the depth of loneliness I experienced as a CEO is difficult to put into words”.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Space X and xAI, compared starting a company to “staring into the abyss and eating glass” in an interview in April 2013, according to a report by Entrepreneur.

According to the BBC, when asked about being Tesla’s CEO in 2021, he said: “I have to or, frankly, Tesla is going to die.”