Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has exactly one direct report.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang manages sixty. Meta's new AI org runs one manager for every fifty engineers.
Same industry, opposite structures — and all three are having a great year.
You'd think there was a right answer
Amodei confirmed in a Bloomberg interview in June that he has just one direct report — his chief of staff, Avital Balwit. Every other executive reports to his sister, co-founder and president Daniela Amodei, instead.
He summed up the arrangement in one line: "It's incredibly freeing." He spends roughly half his time talking directly with employees, reinforcing how the company operates.
Around the same time, Nvidia's Jensen Huang went the opposite direction. He manages around sixty people directly — the widest span of any Fortune 500 CEO. Meta went further still, rolling out a 1-to-50 manager ratio for its new AI org — double what's usually considered the outer limit.
| Leader | Company | Direct Reports |
|---|---|---|
| Dario Amodei | Anthropic (2,300+ employees) | 1 |
| Mark Zuckerberg | Meta (his own core group) | 25–30 |
| General benchmark | Cross-industry consensus | 7 ± 2 |
| Jensen Huang | Nvidia (42,000+ employees) | ~60 |
| Meta AI org | Meta's new AI division | 1 manager : 50 |
Zoom out and the number has always been shaky. The average CEO's span of control roughly doubled from about 5 direct reports in the mid-1980s to nearly 10 by the mid-2000s. More recently, the average number of employees per manager climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025 — up roughly 50% since 2013. Gallup data shows 37% of managers today oversee fewer than 5 people, 66% oversee fewer than 10, and only 13% manage 25 or more.
So why do both extremes work?
Eric Y. Lee, an assistant professor of management at Texas A&M, frames it as a complexity difference. "Anthropic's senior leadership structure has low complexity, with fewer roles, layers, and specializations, so one direct manager is enough — Nvidia's complexity is higher, so it needs more direct reports."
A narrow span has clear upsides — less bureaucracy, faster communication, a leader who stays close to the work. It has a real downside too: the bottleneck doesn't disappear, it just moves. Amodei manages one person directly, but Daniela is the one running the rest of a 2,000-plus workforce. The management load didn't vanish — it just changed hands.
A wide span cuts the other way. It's cheaper and decisions move faster, but experts are increasingly uneasy about it. Bayes Business School's André Spicer had a blunt take on Meta's 50-to-1 structure.
"It's going to end in tragedy, is the bottom line."
— André Spicer, Bayes Business School
Spicer flagged three specific risks: junior employees getting sidelined, manager burnout, and a loss of direction. It's also easier for the loudest voices to hog a manager's attention. That said, the structure isn't a bad idea everywhere — it tends to hold up better in expert-heavy fields like software engineering. Zappos famously tried to remove management layers entirely, then had to bring managers back.
So what's the right number for your team?
There's no universal answer, but there is a process. Run through these five checks in order.
- Check how repetitive the work is
If every situation needs fresh judgment, go narrow. If the work follows a predictable pattern, you can go wide. - Assess your team's experience
More junior people means a narrower span so you can check in often. A veteran team can handle a much wider one. - Weigh how much error you can tolerate
If mistakes are reversible, go wide. If one mistake is costly, go narrow. - Factor in your own experience as a manager
New to managing? Start small. You can widen your span as you gain experience. - Check your async collaboration setup
Good documentation and shared tools let the same person manage more people well.
If you've run through all five and still aren't sure, default to the general benchmark — 7 ± 2 people. Regardless of team size, employees who get meaningful feedback weekly are about 70% likely to be engaged; without it, that number drops to roughly 25%. The conversation quality matters more than the headcount.
If you want to try Amodei's approach, there's a prerequisite before you cut your number down: hire a chief of staff who can actually carry the load. That person needs to cover strategic planning, project management, and even board communication for you to delegate everything else the way Amodei does. If your team is under 10 people or your budget is tight, though, it's probably not time yet.
Want to go deeper?
How Many Direct Reports? The original Harvard Business Review piece on why CEO span of control keeps growing, and the coordination-versus-control tradeoff behind it. hbr.org
How Many Direct Reports Should You Have? Six practical variables — from task complexity to error tolerance — for setting your own span of control. theceoproject.com
Does Your Startup Need a Chief Of Staff? A practical breakdown of when to hire one — and when definitely not to. forbes.com
Meta's new AI team has 50 engineers per boss A close look at Meta's flat-structure experiment and the warnings management experts raised about it. fortune.com
Span of Control: What's the Optimal Team Size for Managers? Gallup's current data on team sizes and engagement across US managers. gallup.com
