I have learned that the purpose of a CEO in many (most?) companies is not to actually run the company.
Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not enough for a lot of customers.
If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.
Huh. The sales team at my company is the one who closes millions in ARR and all the enterprise contracts - not the CEO. I’m sure being the “conduit of information and a representative element” is very important though. Someone has to attend investor meetings…
None of these other teams ever involve the CEO for key activities? E.g. sales has a major client that wants top level visibility to sign the contract on the big deal? I was in sales many years and anything from letters of commitment to flyouts with the CEO was always a big factor in the large deals - it gave a sense of "we have full assurance they are focused on this" to the customer and was very helpful.
I'm not sure it justifies the salary, but that's a different thing.
It’s a function of relative scale. If you’re a Fortune 100 CEO there is still a point where you would quarterback a sale, but that would be like… a $10 billion+ contract with the federal government.
That is why the E stands for Executive. COO's run the company. The CEO wines and dines and handles vision and escalations. You have described it to a T.
Now, sometimes CEO's run he company. Often not though.
So when the corporations do something illegal why doesn’t this conduit go to jail or pay out of pocket for misconduct? Or is the said conduit only in play for all the convenient aspects of the job like firing people while taking millions in bonuses?
why if YOU profit off a single copyright violation, it could be $250,000 and up to five years, but if you do it against millions of artists, and have a corporation (and money), it's just a few thousand per and you walk and keep doing business (never mind pretending the rest of it is 'fair use', when no human work is being done to produce the Fourier-combined ploduct and nothing new is added).
If a business is a two person shop, it is very easy to prove the culpability of a CEO. However, in a large corporation, it is very hard to prove the culpability of a CEO, as too many people are involved. That's why you see small business owners are easier to prosecute than CEOs of larger corporations.
Yup, when the company succeeds or does something good, it's the CEO's excellent leadership. When the company fails or does something bad, the culpability gets spread vaguely over the entire company.
I genuinely used to think that the reason CEOs and other executives made as much money as they did was because they were accepting the risk of steering a large company that might screw them
Boy was I wrong. They have zero risk and pure upside of being an executive. Oh it's a hard job, it's stressful?
That's not what CU held. The idea that corporations have legal personhood with some degree of rights is much, much older than Citizens United.
Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.
The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?
Nobody wants to be the first one who cant pool large sums of money to influence politics, but, yes, im okay with not being allowed to spend millions of dollars to influence our politics. Our society has too much wealth inequality for that to be a good idea.
This would mean that all media companies in the US would be prevented from publishing anything that could be perceived as negative about any candidate running for elected office, regardless of factual basis and regardless of if it were satire.
A candidate would simply go to any circuit court judge and get an injunction against the media company. If the media company did not comply, the judge would find the officers in contempt. Marshals would then arrest and throw the companies officers in jail indefinitely until they complied.
That's what you're asking for. It's genuinely stupid. I say this as someone that would declare a national emergency on day 1 of being elected just to have the Air Force turn most media company HQs into smoldering craters.
It doesn't have to, there are tons of restrictions that could be used to improve the status quo. Limiting how close to an election these things can be released. Limiting how much money an individual can contribute. Limiting how much money a single organization can spend. We have levers, we choose not to use them.
Claude is gaff-immune in 187 languages, never dips it's pen in the company ink, and can remember every calibrated nuance of guidance at every earnings call ever. It can impartially judge senior staff, provide updates to the board at any time, and personally interact with every customer.
Sounds dangerous for liability reasons. Sometimes it is important to not write things down and have plausible deniability. Courts getting access to everything the CEO knows is not something a corporation wants.
Nepo babies, trust fund kids, and frat boys the world around reading this comment out loud to each other on the golf course laughing, "HE ACTUALLY BOUGHT IT! AHAHAHAHA"
I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day.
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.
You are confusing CEO pay with CEO ability. There is plenty of examples of companies doing poorly until a new CEO comes in, and others of a company doing well until the CEO retires and a replacement comes in.
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
There are plenty of good ways to assess performance of CEO. However the important ones can only be run 10-20 years from now and so they are not helpful.
There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all, despite what the executive class would have you believe. The aristocracy of old also argued that their titles were earned and that society could not function without them.
> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform
How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."
> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all
Sure, but somebody is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.
And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.
Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.
> But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions.
There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value.
What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company?
There are tons of reasons why companies exist (the whole Theory of the Firm line of research), but the information asymmetry barriers are constantly coming down.
Sure, a college student can tell you if a company is making or losing money. But there are ample examples of "good" companies crashing because they didn't react to shifts in the market, which requires projecting into the future.
Blockbuster was good until it wasn't. Sears was good until it wasn't. Barnes and Noble was good, then it fell apart, and now it's good again. The lesson to learn is that by the time your financials say things are taking a turn, you're a year to multiple years late to start fixing the problem.
Warren Buffet has always said that he likes to invest in businesses that are so great that even an idiot can run them (because often an idiot will be running them).
Any company that is thrashing around, constantly changing priorities, executive turnover, lots of layoffs is obviously being poorly run, yet this is typically exactly what happens when a new CEO is bought in to fix whatever was ailing before: the almost inevitable new-CEO plan: fire executives, bring in past cronies, have a few layoffs (because he's a tough guy, making those tough decisions), and change company priorities. Rinse and repeat - in a few years there'll be a new CEO coming in and doing the same again.
I think it's the other way around. They're not talking about CEO ability, they're talking about CEO performance, which aren't the same. Money follows performance (based on outcomes, not actual talent). It's like professional sports - win a championship, get a big payday, regardless of how it happened.
No, the only thing that matters is what you can negotiate. Since most executives + board vote on their own salaries, which ones have you ever seen negotiated to lower their salaries?
It's an extreme abuse of power, especially since workers are the sole reason why a company is able to succeed or not and they don't get the same privileges as a board + executive.
Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies).
Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?
You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?
Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.
the world doesnt work like an efficient machine, and capital is far more of a moat than people want to admit. these "founders" are more like professional managers from the same backgrounds as the investors
there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
From the vast amount of VC money going around, nearly half a trillion expected in 2026, not including other forms of funding, it's safe to say that there is a lot of capital for people that can execute.
I don't see how you can translate money to product/startup success. You think there's some magic lever you can press to get people to use your product? Selling $10 for $5 and building a market like that is rare (moviepass) but even that is incredibly difficult. Advertising is very inefficient and sales is hard.
They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.
Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."
Sure, but his equity award deadline had passed, thus the fishing trip. And if things go well with Everett on the trip, the new funding would mean he can ditch those risky accounts.
I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones
I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"
No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.
" more a result of the environment than algorithms"
What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.
i dont think hating on ivy league types is that common, and 90% of people have no real life experience with this kind of thing, or are even aware of how corporate hiring/funding works at the higher level.
But have you been inside the old money, prep school world? It is absolutely about connections and getting into the system for the most part. The meritocracy bootstrap stuff is life coaching fluff to keep us in the middle grinding.
In the startup world they're only really looking to bat better than 10 pct overall to mark success, right? Do we wonder why it's all just a crap shoot?
That's only if the company's revenue is in excess of 100B. There aren't many companies like that. Certainly not enough for an AI platform to monetize.
But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.
But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help
This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.
But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?
Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
I hate this new cult of personality thing many are trying to cultivate.
But to that point most of the time, poor performance is attributed to "the market" and strong performance is attributed to "leadership". There is some clear cognitive dissonance going on.
I’m asking for clarification because if the answer is no I’m afraid we are in psychologically different worlds and people feel out of control of very basic parts of their lives.
It also depends on whether you're providing appropriate compensation for the responsibility that you're offering. I see several cases where managers offer more responsibility for a peanuts' worth of pay hike and then say the same stuff you said.
> In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility,
In my experience, this means one of two things:
You're asking people who already have too much to do, to add even more to their plate.
Or
You're throwing the projects which are doomed to failure and nobody else will touch at them.
In basically every job I've ever had this has been the case. There is nothing like being given a shit sandwich and being told it's delicious ice cream.
The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
They spend 18 rounds over six months vetting a developer with silly puzzles that must be solved from memory, with an audience. It's about as far from the job as possible.
This happened by trying to find capable people that didn't come to you through nepotism and paper mills and such.
The strange thing is that nobody has developed a hiring battery for the naturally hyperconfident employee you met through the grapevine, who costs you millions, and as often as not, irreparably damages the company.
Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?
CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.
The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.
Yeah, JC Penney was not Apple Stores (which by the way probably looked awful to a lot of people on paper--see Microsoft's attempt to clone). But JC Penny was a discount brand whose shoppers absolutely weren't looking for an expensive Apple Store experience.
I feel like we should consider the opposite as well. What if you actually hire someone who is great but they achieve zero results because of sheet bad luck and “help” from a product team that couldn’t go right.
Yes. I've heard some say that SJ being fired allowed him to go out and learn to move from founder to CEO. Only when he came back to Apple did he finally have the skills and maturity to be CEO.
Is Steve Jobs even a good example of "the type of person I want to hire as CEO"? I think he probably is not.
He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
The question remains whether that was all him or a combination of Wozniak and Ive, on top of being at the right place(s) at the right time(s) (iMac, iPod, iPhone).
Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was all SJ. But Woz would have likely stayed at HP without the prodding by SJ.
And since we're talking about CEOs, top-level personnel decisions are one of the biggest impacts a CEO can make. SJ promoted Ive to director of design, he also hired and eventually promoted Cook to COO.
You can still find articles lambasting the iphone for having a small screen, 'who would want to surf the web on their phone'.
The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.
>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?
Man, everyone is demonstrably bad - until they aren't. Some things, like being CEO, are much more rare in the "try, try, try again" space, but it does seem to work like most things. My son was a terrible, demonstrably bad hitter for ~2 years. Then, all of a sudden, he was not, nor will he ever be again.
It is logical that there are people who are great at what they do and others who are not. We’ve all worked with both and if you are in the business of finding talented people, how else would you talk about it?
That’s a weird thing to be upset and reprimand us about.
I suppose one can insist that people say “most talented people” but it seems so much more streamlined and to say “top talent”. I have never come across anyone who is bothered by this.
FWIW I am way more bothered by the use of the word “resources” to refer to people. I think it is disgusting and offensive.
Nuance is “resources” has the connotation of exploitation whereas “talent” is positive. The former is used to also refer to non-human things like iron ore, but I am not aware that “talent” is ever used to refer to anything other than people.
Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.
> Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.
I'm not sure why you mention that part. Maybe the text doesn't fully carry your message, so I need to ask: are you proud that you are not trying to change people?
I don't know, sounds very off putting, just like "resources" in "human resources". I get that this is normalized in all the corporations, but one still can choose to use terms that don't reduce people to "value produced".
I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias.
I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.
Is it just that the company collapsed? The third-rate version of him probably would have ended up in jail a-la SBF or Ms Holmes, with hopefully no one getting killed or maimed, or chemicals in a factory causing cancer across neighborhoods or poisoning wells or something.
The same thing is true in software engineering: an AI model is equivalent to an average programer (average with a huge standard deviation). Averigua is better than half, but still way behind the top performers
I would like to replace a few CIOs or CTOs at some companies, software quality has been down the drain since before AI. It's just terrible. Stock market pricing driven development is a detriment on software quality.
I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.
> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.
Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....
I think there are parallels here to software development.
When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.
So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.
Is a company ever really just "ticking along" though? Seems to me like you're always sliding one way or the other, largely due to leadership at the top.
How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.
And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?
The site is satire… I don’t think it’s a serious pitch for “replace your CEO with AI”, it’s “hey, CEOs, if you disagree with this, why don’t you apply the same logic to all the parts of your business and all the employees you’ve confidently stated will be replaced by AI?”
Months? Most terrible founders and CEOs I've worked for set the company back years, and most of the time significantly damaged it to the point of no return for everyone involved. The worst ones are the arrogant, low-skill and/or low-effort bunch. They destroy the soul of the company, drive away customers, talent and loot whatever value is left in the company and take for themselves.
Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.
I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.
Good leadership makes a huge difference - whether that be big or small. I've seen it myself - in particular it's amazing much of a difference good leadership can make at a huge company.
However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.
Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.
See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.
I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.
The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.
CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.
I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company.
Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again.
It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting rich and in my retirement running a game studio in a low cost of living country.
I want to literally code right alongside my employees and pay them fair wages even if we make no money.
Good basic games. A strict no DLC policy and full open source( if possible) 5 years after release.
> CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.
Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that we are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.
Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.
Yeah, it's probably different when the CEO is a founder in some way. As an organization scales, leadership is replaced with non-founders, and blame becomes diffused, the nature of the C-level is just not the same.
The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.
Like others have said - many people at the top are so successful because they ended up at the right place and right time, and their approach just fit exactly the problem at hand. They did not see the future, they just had a hunch - and that can go either way.
Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.
A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.
If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.
Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.
Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.
There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.
You’re getting a lot of pushback, but I’m genuinely interested in your experiences. What differences have you seen between average and top leaders? Not in results, but in terms of how they approached the job?
There's a huge difference between managing a small company in a competitive marketing with self-funding and the administration of the giant public corporations in a increasingly concentrated marketing.
And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.
Kings get a bad rap, but for most of history, peasants loved their kings. Why? Not because kings were great people, but because kings kept the lower-tier nobility in check. Peasants had rights, and could actually become quite wealthy, when kings put limits on the local lords.
The same applies to CEOs. Steve Jobs was a narcissist, but he probably kept a hundred other bikeshedding assholes (who had just as much ego, but far less taste) in check, and that's why Apple was able to function in spite of itself.
the thing about CEOs (well let us just say strategic/visionary) leaders since they're found across the whole org chart level - is finding them is very difficult since assessing their skills is also difficult.
past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.
so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.
> The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
Roughly, how did it become clear that the second or third place candidates set the company back by months? Did the company ultimately hire the first place candidate and discover their superior effectiveness in the org?
How does a board objectively evaluate that a potential CEO is worth say $25M/year over a candidate who will take the job for $4M/year?
Previous job performance isn't that reliable since countless CEOs have been great at one company in terms of raising stock price/revenue/profit/whatever, and then flamed out at a future company. How does one know in advance that one CEO will increase revenue by a few percent more than another, and justify such an expensive compensation package?
Good satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.
It’s not just commercial real estate but selfishly on a personal level too.
Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay.
Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year
I think it’s a socially acceptable costly signal for communicating that power, less about the power itself. Perhaps a different culture could have settled on a humiliation ritual. Either way it has to be costly otherwise it won’t be seen as a true signal though it is likely possible to find a more efficient costly signal.
in Pittsburgh the local government tied RTO to RE valuations for the entire city by way of offering tax benefits to large employers for pushing RTO. I won't debate you on middle managers wanting power, the two aren't mutually exclusive. But WFH costs business districts a ton of money and that pressure isn't just being absorbed. Cities offer employers subsidies in exchange for RTO and get their money back in collecting taxes on parking, lunches, rideshares, after work drinks, quick shopping on the way home and all the other costs that employees bear. It's a direct wealth transfer from the working class to local governments, which then pass some of that wealth onto the business owners.
> Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police
2010-2016 in SF there was no such thing as a manager except PM who had no power (they were mostly just happy to be there).
Over time middle management and HR got insane - became the entire show. The whole point of a tech job. Then it was 1:1s and backstabbing all the sudden you could get someone fired. Hilarious, a few years prior if you complained about someone it was your problem - if you don’t like the culture you can leave. And some did because there were many opportunities.
Same thing happened with the web. Turned into banning and blacklisting and all the bullshit authority surrounding the activity taking over the activity itself - ruining it.
It’s not needed, we did better without these things.
i appreciate this kind of funny commentary but on the flip side, compare the top software list in 2026 - facebook, instagram, tiktok, gmail, youtube, chatgpt, ios camera, google docs, office on ios, android and windows - and two of those were created during 2010-2016, music.ly (tiktok) and instagram. perhaps the environment you describe is really good at creating social media phenomena. i don't know if i'd call it "innovation" but i'm not that judgemental. nonetheless most of the reason things were "good" in 2010-2016 is that the period contains most of the growth of iphone and android adoption (the inflection was in 2013). you are looking at cultural stuff that could be the exact opposite - it could be heavily burdened with management, Apple and Microsoft and their little ecosystem of partners certainly were - and still find success. so another takeaway is, none of that stuff really matters now does it?
I’ve been on Csuite of 3 orgs since the pandemic forced wfh normalization. Your correct the RE thing has always been a false narrative. I’ve never seen or read of it coming from an executive. To my knowledge, it was dreamt up by pundits, speculators, and is just a lazy attempt to understand what goes on in boardrooms driving these decisions.
What I have witnessed, with empirical evidence, is that productivity and/or output across the organization slows down. It is great at first as everyone can catch up on their work and existing projects but then the longer term implications is the teams are disconnected, decisions are more difficult, coordination of simple tasks more difficult, onboarding and actually integrating new employees is difficult, curating the culture is difficult, and it goes on. If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.
So it’s not about anyone’s need to feel worthwhile it’s literally about doing what is probably the best for the company even if it upsets some people. Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better. When productivity goes up, it’s only a good thing if output and all the other tangibles aren’t sacrificed in the process. The leaders of organizations initiating RTO usually have done so by avoiding this true talk type conversation with the employees. This is what has led to people filling in the gaps with BS about real estate evaluations. It’s been poor communication and I think a dose of honestly and openness would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s a feeling and they don’t have the means to really collect data and lay it out in an empirical way, so I think that’s part of the reason they avoid it.
The RE thing may have been a false narrative, but tax abatements were a factor in at least one local company doing RTO; their business tax breaks were partially based on employees working in the city and then paying city payroll tax.
Can I ask how your orgs measured productivity before and after remote work/RTO? I agree that employees would have a much easier time accepting RTO if they were given hard evidence it makes the business more productive, but it seems like almost all companies don’t do this and simply justify RTO “because we know best” which frustrates ICs.
Sometimes there a track record of output to reference on. Project velocity. There’s a lot and I probably work in industries that aren’t comparable to yours so no use getting specific. Sometimes it’s just a hard thing for ICs to look at the whole operation instead of their part. The fact ICs think productivity is the most important thing they can provide is a signal they’re wrong (in the eyes of a leadership team).
The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.
output only slows down because companies don't want to adjust how they work. its a complete skill issue if you cant manage a remote org. if a company/team is already spread out across multiple offices, its a remote org
There’s truth here. They don’t want to. It’s easier and more tried and true to just go back to what worked before wfh. Even multiple offices face some challenges working together. Always have. But usually there’s some systematic way of organizing the offices so most the function is together. As example, I’m a CFO and usually have my key teams (various teams of accounting and finance functions) in the same office. 90% of their work/communication/collaboration is amongst themselves. Being together does help.
> Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better
This is what the execs might THINK but it's not actually based in real evidence. RTO does not make organizations function better. Execs are gaslighting themselves into believing that RTO makes the org function better, but it's an illusion.
This is a bad take. There are plenty of orgs that were remote in some form or another way before covid. They're just organized and managed differently. It's 100% a management doesn't want to change issue.
Even if all the negatives are true, I am skeptical that it has a measurable impact on productivity. There are often outside factors that put a ceiling on what can be done anyway, with high productivity just causing days of waiting instead of any tangible reward.
Is your opinion that groups of 1000+ naturally align and deliver business value lock step with company needs? Is coordination not needed? Is leadership not needed?
Why does coordination and leadership require my boss to be 15 feet from me, locked in his office 95% of the day, instead of tethered much the same through Teams?
https://ai-ceo.org did it first, including the nicely styled retirement invitation for your existing CEO, the wired up status dashboard with live socials support, and the complimentary ai-chro.org product for deciding who gets laid off this week.
Would love some kind of randomized A-B test where CEOs are replaced with AI and the outcome measured. Would not at all be surprised if it’s far better than the bottom quartile or more.
More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
CEOs can definitely be "hacked" by scammers but I think the public will react differently when a large company puts a lot of control in the hands of AI and it is scammed with some kind of cognitive hack that people assume wouldn't work as well on expensive wetware.
I'm kinda curious how AI would cope with immoral or ammoral decisions and tactics used daily by competition and if itself would start to practice them.
They should be, I see them as the prime targets for AI. Most of what they do is bullshit, they're often massively over paid, and AI will produce answers 100 times faster than they will.
I mostly agree with you. There are a few exceptions of some CEOs I have met that just truly understand the industry they are in. Like rain main counting toothpicks, they just know their space so well that they can anticipate where their market is going. The ratio of these types vs the “normies” is about 3:4000 though.
Why would you be scared? I keep hearing about how this is the best time ever to be a programmer because typing everything out by hand is no longer necessary. (apparently a lot of AI fans never heard of code generators, but anyway)
You got it all wrong. You see, AGI (conveniently ignore the definition for now) might be able to replace everybody. In truth it will be uses by the C level to subjugate everybody else.
We can actually review code and prompt better. Most of these people's skills involve connections made in business schools and the ability to shoot shit during three-martini lunches.
That’s the entire idea behind Garry Tan’s (CEO of the company that runs this site) gstack - that you can substitute a lot of company functions with AI (including the CEO). I don’t think you can yet and his tweets are bonkers but reality has already exceeded this parody.
Considering AI's strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense that upper management—whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices—may be easier to replace with AI than frontline or essential workers, who constantly have to adapt to unpredictable situations.
But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
I worked for five companies in two years about a decade ago (Pre retail Gen-AI). All of them had the exact same mission slide deck. Same goals, same priorities, same strategy.
I disagree with the monetization model. There should be 1 month free trial. If the companiy's performance metrics (stock price?) improve, the CEO should pay for it and get fired.
A company should be judged on longer term metrics than one month. Often the best action is to take a loss for several months while you set the company up for long term success. Often is not always of course. If you take over at a soap manufacture there is unlikely to be much investment that would make a change in the companies performance - soap is a well understood product that has been around for many years and the processes to make it have been optimized for years (I'm sure there is room for improvement, but many will not pay off.)
Funny, but 2027 will actually be the year of the AI Companies run by AI CEOs.
Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success.
There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
Obviously there will be a person nominally administering it and officially running it. But some of them will be really minimizing the human involvement.
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
At first I thought this person has no clue what ceos actually do. But then I realized that may be part of the satire - ceos fire people without actually knowing what they do other than high level bullet points
"What does this team do? Answer customer tickets? Well let's replace with AI!"
I did something similar but in the form of just a group of ai skills and rules.
If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses.
I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients.
Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
> OverpAId has raised $0 in Series A funding, at a valuation of infinity divided by zero. Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable".
> ""satire" is just a first draft with bad timing."
I'm stealing this one.
Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
I personally believe AI is most readily positioned for top-down automation, rather than bottom-up automation. This seems painfully obvious in almost every domain.
Not a joke, living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs". Read their profile, see them in an all hands meeting, they look incredible. Spend any lengthy unscripted time with them behind closed doors, they are absolutely clueless. The trick is true access to these people is so limited, and usually guarded.
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
> living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs"
> they are absolutely clueless.
That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.
This hits so close to home im not even sure how to reply. The horror of these people needing to actually have an indepth discussion about low level details of their business
Have you ever read the chapters in "American Psycho" where Patrick Bateman goes into a multi-page digression about the style and characteristics of very specific mid 1980s era pop music acts? Basically, like that.
> With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
No, you've identified the real issue: all the CEOs come from Harvard/Yale. There is a very large wealth class divide between the people who get these jobs almost exclusively due to "networking" (often failing upwards) and the increasingly rare people who actually work up to those roles. It's very much a club that uses every tool possible to maintain the opportunity hording, including AI.
This is largely because being an executive in 2026 has very, very, little to due with technical expertise. AI will just be another tool in their workshop for that.
I work for one of these. Never had a real job, and it shows. They sure can present a slide deck. Organizing a company around a coherent strategy is very clearly beyond them.
I'm skeptical. How can a one time payment be sustainable when they offer 24/7/365? I'm also unsure how they got such a high valuation with this clear drawback.
I think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point that CEOs or other execs can’t be replaced simply because AI can do their jobs. C-suite job security comes from power structures, not task execution.
Except the CEO should not have anything to with operations. They are there for their connections in every company I have worked at. They are friends with other executives, or politicians and can sway things in the companies favor if needed. They hire their friends to work alongside them. The C-Suite team are just buddies and that is it. They are rarely held accountable and they get raises (along with their exec buddies) because they are friends with their board members who were previous or current executives somewhere else. They will vote on 100% bonuses for themselves faster than your boss can get you a 5 cent raise
This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
A CEO's job isn't the one that everybody here apparently thinks it is. A CEO's job is networking, marketing and PR. They get paid the way they do because they can get into the rooms they need to get into to build the inter-business relationships they need to build.
That's right. Obviously they need to build a network before they become a CEO, but that's what Ivy League's, family connections, and exclusive private schools are for.
Yes, but the way you're phrasing it suggests there's something getting lost in translation. A CEO's job is to perform the role of CEO: when the head of engineering wants to zig, and the head of marketing wants to zag, they need to choose between the two in a way that leaves no question about what the decision is or whether the direction should be followed. I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way, I certainly wouldn't.
AI can’t replace genuine 1:1 human interaction. We’re social animals, and a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.
No, that’s why there is a concern. They’re replacing human relationships with things that superficially look like human relationships but have no depth.
No, that's other people being concerned, it's not the people in the relationships that are concerned.
The position was "a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human" and quite clearly to some people it can, so the statement is false.
But how much of a CEO’s job requires 1:1 human interaction? If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?
If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings they’re going to be surprised how much laughter they get in return.
> If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings
Oh hell no. That's not where the value lies.
You can't send an AI CEO as part of a trade delegation. Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens. That's the sort of thing a human CEO does that an AI can't.
> The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends.
Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world
Not a great analogy. These kids are partially satisfying something with AI girlfriends. I'd liken it more to people giving up on food and living on Soylent.
Awful choice for themselves and their futures. They may think they are making a rational choice but they’re not thinking about the future. Just like teenagers have always done.
Not that any of it is gender specific. The women on /r/myboyfriendisai are making the exact same mistakes, in many ways it’s worse because many are fully grown adults.
> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.
In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do.
An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.
Good effort, but the ultimate goal has to be replacing the entire planet's economic stack with AI, from janitors to principal engineers to the entire board to dictators to Elon Musk's drug dealer, and creating a closed-bottle AIconomy trading entirely in AI speculation on the blockchain.
If you have read Bullshit Jobs, you'll be familiar with the concept of bullshit/corpslop as a parallel system of value / signalling to economic value. Unlike economic value however, this type of value collapses if severed from the person producing it.
I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
Some CEOs are genuinely good, but the buzzword-spouting MBA types? Fire away.
Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination.
AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
Of course, in Europe, we like to have people to buy the CEO position. Ie. a CEO doesn't cost the company money, he (or, sometimes, she) pays to be CEO. This of course then leads to CEOs seeing it as their right to extract a LOT of money, so the investment is profitable. This even sometimes goes in the public sector.
Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
Sometimes I wish AI could do my economic activities for me. There's a conspiracy theory that says if you get vaccinated, your body gets taken over by a millionaire. I actually like that conspiracy theory. Sometimes I wish someone would control me. Having a self and consciousness is just too painful.
Yeah, gotta go to work and earn a dime to have something to eat, right? It would be great if someone paid for your living while you could just "enjoy life", right? Maybe those suckers who actually enjoy doing stuff and get paid in return.
But I do think you can't enjoy life if you don't work. Pain is the seasoning of life. Of course, my life is full of seasoning and nothing else. Both pain and pleasure are necessary. It's just that there's only pain right now, which is the problem. If AI could just handle the economic activities for me so I could have a little bit of 'pleasure,' that would be great. I just want to do the programming I actually enjoy
Oof. Pain may well be the "seasoning of life" but work is not pain.
Work is the thing that helps one lift society up.
We're all connected beings and one's occupation is how we each contribute to that society. The idea that it's something we suffer through in order to eat is a crummy reversal of the idea of having purpose.
It doesn't matter if one is selling toilets or scrubbing them, each of us is still keeping civilization in motion; giving it life.
Don't enjoy your occupation? Go back to school. Can't afford school? Hunt down people you respect and figure out how to work with or for them.
Hmm, I've also worked with professors (from top Korean universities). them hiring me and me getting a degree from them are different things.
Well, I don't believe that just because you work hard, you'll always succeed. Most people just see me as a subordinate worker. Of course, if you come from a wealthy family, it's probably different.
Seeing that the series aired on Apple TV+, it seems like Apple knows exactly what its employees are doing. Maybe they just turned what their employees want into a drama? hehe
Augment, rather than replace, is a better positioning. An LLM-based CxO suite that 'shadows' the human CxO suite ensures traditional accountability mechanisms remain functional, while delivering improved transparency and independence of performance evaluation. The 'captured board' problem is a barrier to adoption, yet external insurance and banking stakeholders can provide a range of incentives that will compel adoption.
> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.
Disagree with this statement.
Take Walmart (as a boring example):
- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA
- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m
CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.
Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
Quantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation.
If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.
I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.
I have learned that the purpose of a CEO in many (most?) companies is not to actually run the company.
Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not enough for a lot of customers.
If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.
Huh. The sales team at my company is the one who closes millions in ARR and all the enterprise contracts - not the CEO. I’m sure being the “conduit of information and a representative element” is very important though. Someone has to attend investor meetings…
None of these other teams ever involve the CEO for key activities? E.g. sales has a major client that wants top level visibility to sign the contract on the big deal? I was in sales many years and anything from letters of commitment to flyouts with the CEO was always a big factor in the large deals - it gave a sense of "we have full assurance they are focused on this" to the customer and was very helpful.
I'm not sure it justifies the salary, but that's a different thing.
Not at my workplace, the highest as far as I know is two levels below the CEO, usually a VP of some kind.
It’s a function of relative scale. If you’re a Fortune 100 CEO there is still a point where you would quarterback a sale, but that would be like… a $10 billion+ contract with the federal government.
Interesting. At a smaller company I worked at, the CEO was a sales role, as far as I could tell.
The only thing that i know that my ceo did was to sell his company, that went to shit after that
sure, that doesn't mean pay is justified
That is why the E stands for Executive. COO's run the company. The CEO wines and dines and handles vision and escalations. You have described it to a T.
Now, sometimes CEO's run he company. Often not though.
So when the corporations do something illegal why doesn’t this conduit go to jail or pay out of pocket for misconduct? Or is the said conduit only in play for all the convenient aspects of the job like firing people while taking millions in bonuses?
Aka all the benefits, none of the negs
why if YOU profit off a single copyright violation, it could be $250,000 and up to five years, but if you do it against millions of artists, and have a corporation (and money), it's just a few thousand per and you walk and keep doing business (never mind pretending the rest of it is 'fair use', when no human work is being done to produce the Fourier-combined ploduct and nothing new is added).
If a business is a two person shop, it is very easy to prove the culpability of a CEO. However, in a large corporation, it is very hard to prove the culpability of a CEO, as too many people are involved. That's why you see small business owners are easier to prosecute than CEOs of larger corporations.
Size isn’t an excuse.
If there’s no real accountability then it’s a very real and negative problem.
it is very hard to prove the culpability of a CEO for anything bad
it is very easy to prove to the CEO earned the credit for all things good
Yup, when the company succeeds or does something good, it's the CEO's excellent leadership. When the company fails or does something bad, the culpability gets spread vaguely over the entire company.
Thats the excuse given, but it makes no sense. All you do is state "CEOs are culpable for the actions of the campany". Bam, problem solved.
I genuinely used to think that the reason CEOs and other executives made as much money as they did was because they were accepting the risk of steering a large company that might screw them
Boy was I wrong. They have zero risk and pure upside of being an executive. Oh it's a hard job, it's stressful?
So is mine and I get paid peanuts in comparison!
That's why Citizens United is a sham. Corporations are NOT people. If they were, they would see more consequences. But no one ever does.
That's not what CU held. The idea that corporations have legal personhood with some degree of rights is much, much older than Citizens United.
Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.
The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?
Nobody wants to be the first one who cant pool large sums of money to influence politics, but, yes, im okay with not being allowed to spend millions of dollars to influence our politics. Our society has too much wealth inequality for that to be a good idea.
This would mean that all media companies in the US would be prevented from publishing anything that could be perceived as negative about any candidate running for elected office, regardless of factual basis and regardless of if it were satire.
A candidate would simply go to any circuit court judge and get an injunction against the media company. If the media company did not comply, the judge would find the officers in contempt. Marshals would then arrest and throw the companies officers in jail indefinitely until they complied.
That's what you're asking for. It's genuinely stupid. I say this as someone that would declare a national emergency on day 1 of being elected just to have the Air Force turn most media company HQs into smoldering craters.
It doesn't have to, there are tons of restrictions that could be used to improve the status quo. Limiting how close to an election these things can be released. Limiting how much money an individual can contribute. Limiting how much money a single organization can spend. We have levers, we choose not to use them.
Slippery slope fallacies are not good foundations to make a reasoned argument on.
Also a single person for the board to hold accountable. In essence the individual that represents the company to outside groups.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other working cultures have adopted committees as the top. Is is the dominant form in US shareholder capitalism.
The original post is surely satire.
> The original post is surely satire.
Yes, they say so at the bottom of the page.
Claude is gaff-immune in 187 languages, never dips it's pen in the company ink, and can remember every calibrated nuance of guidance at every earnings call ever. It can impartially judge senior staff, provide updates to the board at any time, and personally interact with every customer.
CEO seems like a great job for AI.
Sounds dangerous for liability reasons. Sometimes it is important to not write things down and have plausible deniability. Courts getting access to everything the CEO knows is not something a corporation wants.
> Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity.
A simulacrum of accountability to be replaced in lieu of ever acknowledging fault. No machine could ever replace a flesh-and-blood scapegoat.
Even acknowledging fault is a poor substitute for not fucking up in the first place.
Nepo babies, trust fund kids, and frat boys the world around reading this comment out loud to each other on the golf course laughing, "HE ACTUALLY BOUGHT IT! AHAHAHAHA"
I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day.
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.
The post is a satire and when writing this I see it at #1 of the front page and the comment is #1 too. So I guess you are kinda wrong.
I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.
No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.
This is actually how the world works
You are confusing CEO pay with CEO ability. There is plenty of examples of companies doing poorly until a new CEO comes in, and others of a company doing well until the CEO retires and a replacement comes in.
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
no its not like that, these people get plopped into positions of power, and alot of time theres no good way to assess their performance
There are plenty of good ways to assess performance of CEO. However the important ones can only be run 10-20 years from now and so they are not helpful.
Right it’s like venture investing c very hard to evaluate short term
Is there? I don't see many control group companies working in absence of a CEO.
There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all, despite what the executive class would have you believe. The aristocracy of old also argued that their titles were earned and that society could not function without them.
yeah just sit there, keep a steady hand, and project confidence
There are a lot of well-functioning organizations for which that’s exactly what’s needed.
Leaders should be paid for outcomes not activities.
Outcomes of leadership are hard to measure.
If you pay by success of the company, noone is going to want to do a 5 year corporate turnaround.
> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform
How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."
> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all
Sure, but somebody is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.
And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.
Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.
> But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions.
There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value.
What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company?
There are tons of reasons why companies exist (the whole Theory of the Firm line of research), but the information asymmetry barriers are constantly coming down.
Nah.
We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated.
The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies before they become real companies.
Sure, a college student can tell you if a company is making or losing money. But there are ample examples of "good" companies crashing because they didn't react to shifts in the market, which requires projecting into the future.
Blockbuster was good until it wasn't. Sears was good until it wasn't. Barnes and Noble was good, then it fell apart, and now it's good again. The lesson to learn is that by the time your financials say things are taking a turn, you're a year to multiple years late to start fixing the problem.
Yes, sometimes a healthy company will eventually have their business undermined by some future technology.
Except that's not what we were discussing.
There are plenty of anecdotal examples of co-CEOs not working very well.
Warren Buffet has always said that he likes to invest in businesses that are so great that even an idiot can run them (because often an idiot will be running them).
Any company that is thrashing around, constantly changing priorities, executive turnover, lots of layoffs is obviously being poorly run, yet this is typically exactly what happens when a new CEO is bought in to fix whatever was ailing before: the almost inevitable new-CEO plan: fire executives, bring in past cronies, have a few layoffs (because he's a tough guy, making those tough decisions), and change company priorities. Rinse and repeat - in a few years there'll be a new CEO coming in and doing the same again.
I think it's the other way around. They're not talking about CEO ability, they're talking about CEO performance, which aren't the same. Money follows performance (based on outcomes, not actual talent). It's like professional sports - win a championship, get a big payday, regardless of how it happened.
No, the only thing that matters is what you can negotiate. Since most executives + board vote on their own salaries, which ones have you ever seen negotiated to lower their salaries?
It's an extreme abuse of power, especially since workers are the sole reason why a company is able to succeed or not and they don't get the same privileges as a board + executive.
Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies).
Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?
You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?
Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.
This is actually how the world works.
the world doesnt work like an efficient machine, and capital is far more of a moat than people want to admit. these "founders" are more like professional managers from the same backgrounds as the investors
there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
Saying capital is a moat is not convincing.
From the vast amount of VC money going around, nearly half a trillion expected in 2026, not including other forms of funding, it's safe to say that there is a lot of capital for people that can execute.
I don't see how you can translate money to product/startup success. You think there's some magic lever you can press to get people to use your product? Selling $10 for $5 and building a market like that is rare (moviepass) but even that is incredibly difficult. Advertising is very inefficient and sales is hard.
https://dealroom.co/guides/global
> Investors aren't dumb.
They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
Assuming he doesn’t completely shit the bed he can spin any mediocre tenure into a great success and now he has experience running a company.
"This is actually how the world works"
The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.
Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors
I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."
Sure, but his equity award deadline had passed, thus the fishing trip. And if things go well with Everett on the trip, the new funding would mean he can ditch those risky accounts.
I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones
I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"
No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.
" more a result of the environment than algorithms"
What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.
i dont think hating on ivy league types is that common, and 90% of people have no real life experience with this kind of thing, or are even aware of how corporate hiring/funding works at the higher level.
But have you been inside the old money, prep school world? It is absolutely about connections and getting into the system for the most part. The meritocracy bootstrap stuff is life coaching fluff to keep us in the middle grinding.
Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .
you messed up!
It's who you know. You are just more likely to know the right people to raise money than a random non-Ivy type.
In the startup world they're only really looking to bat better than 10 pct overall to mark success, right? Do we wonder why it's all just a crap shoot?
Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?
"proven talent"?
That's only if the company's revenue is in excess of 100B. There aren't many companies like that. Certainly not enough for an AI platform to monetize.
But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.
But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help
This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.
But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?
Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
You can't drop everyone in that position but there is a significant number that still could do it. It is not 100% more like 50%/60% luck.
Does execution, management, marketing and hiring not matter? The best product or opportunity wins and it’s just whose along for the ride?
I hate this new cult of personality thing many are trying to cultivate.
But to that point most of the time, poor performance is attributed to "the market" and strong performance is attributed to "leadership". There is some clear cognitive dissonance going on.
So you don’t believe execution on these points makes a difference?
Bring it more local. Does how you manage your household or work matter? Where does scaling that up break?
Seems people have been very clear on this and you keep dragging it back to points already made.
I’m asking for clarification because if the answer is no I’m afraid we are in psychologically different worlds and people feel out of control of very basic parts of their lives.
Everything matters. Luck matters as much as the other things.
What is luck and why assume an equal weighting? Is it luck whether you accomplish your household chores?
You know which people are eager to take on more responsibilities? The people who don't believe in the concept responsibility.
It also depends on whether you're providing appropriate compensation for the responsibility that you're offering. I see several cases where managers offer more responsibility for a peanuts' worth of pay hike and then say the same stuff you said.
Yes. At my work place a level bump is almost a doubling of comp and the main criteria is being able to be responsible for projects.
Are there people who could do more and are happy where they are at? Sure. But that’s also not going to work for CEO.
> In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility,
In my experience, this means one of two things:
You're asking people who already have too much to do, to add even more to their plate.
Or
You're throwing the projects which are doomed to failure and nobody else will touch at them.
In basically every job I've ever had this has been the case. There is nothing like being given a shit sandwich and being told it's delicious ice cream.
So you don’t think people have a skill ceiling in this area?
From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
They spend 18 rounds over six months vetting a developer with silly puzzles that must be solved from memory, with an audience. It's about as far from the job as possible.
This happened by trying to find capable people that didn't come to you through nepotism and paper mills and such.
The strange thing is that nobody has developed a hiring battery for the naturally hyperconfident employee you met through the grapevine, who costs you millions, and as often as not, irreparably damages the company.
>Leaders are necessary.
Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?
And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.
Maybe we should have LLMs (and ML for results) start hiring at the top level to dogfood some reality back into the class
CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.
The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.
Yeah, JC Penney was not Apple Stores (which by the way probably looked awful to a lot of people on paper--see Microsoft's attempt to clone). But JC Penny was a discount brand whose shoppers absolutely weren't looking for an expensive Apple Store experience.
I feel like we should consider the opposite as well. What if you actually hire someone who is great but they achieve zero results because of sheet bad luck and “help” from a product team that couldn’t go right.
Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.
Steve Jobs was hired as the CEO of Apple when the company was 20 years old. He was never CEO before that.
Yes. I've heard some say that SJ being fired allowed him to go out and learn to move from founder to CEO. Only when he came back to Apple did he finally have the skills and maturity to be CEO.
Is Steve Jobs even a good example of "the type of person I want to hire as CEO"? I think he probably is not.
He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
The question remains whether that was all him or a combination of Wozniak and Ive, on top of being at the right place(s) at the right time(s) (iMac, iPod, iPhone).
Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was all SJ. But Woz would have likely stayed at HP without the prodding by SJ.
And since we're talking about CEOs, top-level personnel decisions are one of the biggest impacts a CEO can make. SJ promoted Ive to director of design, he also hired and eventually promoted Cook to COO.
You can still find articles lambasting the iphone for having a small screen, 'who would want to surf the web on their phone'.
The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.
>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?
Yes, my opinion is that after being the CEO of Next and Pixar he became the CEO we associate with Apple's success in the 2000s.
Man, everyone is demonstrably bad - until they aren't. Some things, like being CEO, are much more rare in the "try, try, try again" space, but it does seem to work like most things. My son was a terrible, demonstrably bad hitter for ~2 years. Then, all of a sudden, he was not, nor will he ever be again.
Agreed. I was thinking more along the lines of what does it mean to say "I want to hire the next Steve Jobs as our CEO"?
"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?
I'm not OP but I think it is both normal, proper, and desirable.
It is logical that there are people who are great at what they do and others who are not. We’ve all worked with both and if you are in the business of finding talented people, how else would you talk about it?
"Talented people", not "talent".
That’s a weird thing to be upset and reprimand us about.
I suppose one can insist that people say “most talented people” but it seems so much more streamlined and to say “top talent”. I have never come across anyone who is bothered by this.
FWIW I am way more bothered by the use of the word “resources” to refer to people. I think it is disgusting and offensive.
Well, then you just did. :)
Nuance is “resources” has the connotation of exploitation whereas “talent” is positive. The former is used to also refer to non-human things like iron ore, but I am not aware that “talent” is ever used to refer to anything other than people.
Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.
> Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.
I'm not sure why you mention that part. Maybe the text doesn't fully carry your message, so I need to ask: are you proud that you are not trying to change people?
Sounds a bit like casting lingo in performing arts, but other than that, not sure what you're hinting at.
Yes, “the talent” is waiting out in their trailer and needs you to talk to them
... What are you getting at, I'm genuinely curious? What's wrong with the phrase "top talent"!?
I don't know, sounds very off putting, just like "resources" in "human resources". I get that this is normalized in all the corporations, but one still can choose to use terms that don't reduce people to "value produced".
This is unusually reactive response to normal language.
"Talented" is normal "Talent" is abusive
Yes. Highly accountable and responsible people with deep knowledge are rare.
I respect your opinion, but behind winners imho there's 99% being in the right place at the right time. And people change and so do their motivation.
I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.
I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias.
I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.
Is it just that the company collapsed? The third-rate version of him probably would have ended up in jail a-la SBF or Ms Holmes, with hopefully no one getting killed or maimed, or chemicals in a factory causing cancer across neighborhoods or poisoning wells or something.
There are things worse than losing your job.
Only truly exceptional executives can be SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
There's also Madoff.
Or maybe the third rate version would have made different choices, and those may have due to pure chance worked out well for us.
The same thing is true in software engineering: an AI model is equivalent to an average programer (average with a huge standard deviation). Averigua is better than half, but still way behind the top performers
I would like to replace a few CIOs or CTOs at some companies, software quality has been down the drain since before AI. It's just terrible. Stock market pricing driven development is a detriment on software quality.
I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.
> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.
Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....
I think there are parallels here to software development.
When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.
So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.
Is a company ever really just "ticking along" though? Seems to me like you're always sliding one way or the other, largely due to leadership at the top.
Same goes for software development projects. I think the point of the satire is “why does it apply to X but not you?”
> A company just ticking along?
Environment around you changes all the time which means if a company wants to stay around it needs to be able to adapt at any moment.
Steve jobs said the same thing. however, we need to define great talent. imo they are laser focused people who also love helping others.
unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?
What matters is their connections to powerful people. That's what you buy.
> speaking as a founder/CEO [...] Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.
I see no bias here /s.
Genuine questions from the ground floor:
How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.
And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?
> How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles?
Those with the higher price tag are better /s
> Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".
The site is satire… I don’t think it’s a serious pitch for “replace your CEO with AI”, it’s “hey, CEOs, if you disagree with this, why don’t you apply the same logic to all the parts of your business and all the employees you’ve confidently stated will be replaced by AI?”
If the past decade has taught me anything, it's that today's satire is tomorrow's reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Months? Most terrible founders and CEOs I've worked for set the company back years, and most of the time significantly damaged it to the point of no return for everyone involved. The worst ones are the arrogant, low-skill and/or low-effort bunch. They destroy the soul of the company, drive away customers, talent and loot whatever value is left in the company and take for themselves.
> speaking as a founder/CEO
> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it
The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.
Exactly my reaction. Of course a CEO is going to write a post saying "CEOs are expensive but worth it". At least they admitted to it, I guess!
> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.
How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?
Ars had an interesting story, yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...
Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.
I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.
Good leadership makes a huge difference - whether that be big or small. I've seen it myself - in particular it's amazing much of a difference good leadership can make at a huge company.
However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.
Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.
But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.
Whoa there buddy, you are highlighting that true talent, like beauty, actually does exist. This kind of thinking is not tolerable on Hacker News.
See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.
I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.
The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.
CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.
I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company.
Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again.
It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting rich and in my retirement running a game studio in a low cost of living country.
I want to literally code right alongside my employees and pay them fair wages even if we make no money.
Good basic games. A strict no DLC policy and full open source( if possible) 5 years after release.
> CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.
Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that we are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.
Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.
Maybe this is more of a startup thing , but i remember the CEO personally apologizing to all of us when we shut down.
The buck stops somewhere.
Yeah, it's probably different when the CEO is a founder in some way. As an organization scales, leadership is replaced with non-founders, and blame becomes diffused, the nature of the C-level is just not the same.
That's the point isn't it? You overpay a wealthy dude with connections to gain a node on nepotism graph.
Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?
The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.
Like others have said - many people at the top are so successful because they ended up at the right place and right time, and their approach just fit exactly the problem at hand. They did not see the future, they just had a hunch - and that can go either way.
Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.
A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.
If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.
Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.
Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.
There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.
the quality gap between an average hire and top talent ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶ is night and day.
Fixed that for ya.
You’re getting a lot of pushback, but I’m genuinely interested in your experiences. What differences have you seen between average and top leaders? Not in results, but in terms of how they approached the job?
Sometimes a lot of it is in their rolodex. Important people in government or banking or VC firms or other companies will take their calls.
Most CEOs are not Lisa Su or Steve Jobs, or even remotely close. Current AI could surely do better than the majority of them.
There's a huge difference between managing a small company in a competitive marketing with self-funding and the administration of the giant public corporations in a increasingly concentrated marketing.
And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.
Kings get a bad rap, but for most of history, peasants loved their kings. Why? Not because kings were great people, but because kings kept the lower-tier nobility in check. Peasants had rights, and could actually become quite wealthy, when kings put limits on the local lords.
The same applies to CEOs. Steve Jobs was a narcissist, but he probably kept a hundred other bikeshedding assholes (who had just as much ego, but far less taste) in check, and that's why Apple was able to function in spite of itself.
the thing about CEOs (well let us just say strategic/visionary) leaders since they're found across the whole org chart level - is finding them is very difficult since assessing their skills is also difficult.
past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.
so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.
> The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
Roughly, how did it become clear that the second or third place candidates set the company back by months? Did the company ultimately hire the first place candidate and discover their superior effectiveness in the org?
How does a board objectively evaluate that a potential CEO is worth say $25M/year over a candidate who will take the job for $4M/year?
Previous job performance isn't that reliable since countless CEOs have been great at one company in terms of raising stock price/revenue/profit/whatever, and then flamed out at a future company. How does one know in advance that one CEO will increase revenue by a few percent more than another, and justify such an expensive compensation package?
Good satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.
It’s not just commercial real estate but selfishly on a personal level too.
Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay.
Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year
I think it’s a socially acceptable costly signal for communicating that power, less about the power itself. Perhaps a different culture could have settled on a humiliation ritual. Either way it has to be costly otherwise it won’t be seen as a true signal though it is likely possible to find a more efficient costly signal.
Could learn from Japanese CEOs to an extent right?
in Pittsburgh the local government tied RTO to RE valuations for the entire city by way of offering tax benefits to large employers for pushing RTO. I won't debate you on middle managers wanting power, the two aren't mutually exclusive. But WFH costs business districts a ton of money and that pressure isn't just being absorbed. Cities offer employers subsidies in exchange for RTO and get their money back in collecting taxes on parking, lunches, rideshares, after work drinks, quick shopping on the way home and all the other costs that employees bear. It's a direct wealth transfer from the working class to local governments, which then pass some of that wealth onto the business owners.
> Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police
2010-2016 in SF there was no such thing as a manager except PM who had no power (they were mostly just happy to be there).
Over time middle management and HR got insane - became the entire show. The whole point of a tech job. Then it was 1:1s and backstabbing all the sudden you could get someone fired. Hilarious, a few years prior if you complained about someone it was your problem - if you don’t like the culture you can leave. And some did because there were many opportunities.
Same thing happened with the web. Turned into banning and blacklisting and all the bullshit authority surrounding the activity taking over the activity itself - ruining it.
It’s not needed, we did better without these things.
i appreciate this kind of funny commentary but on the flip side, compare the top software list in 2026 - facebook, instagram, tiktok, gmail, youtube, chatgpt, ios camera, google docs, office on ios, android and windows - and two of those were created during 2010-2016, music.ly (tiktok) and instagram. perhaps the environment you describe is really good at creating social media phenomena. i don't know if i'd call it "innovation" but i'm not that judgemental. nonetheless most of the reason things were "good" in 2010-2016 is that the period contains most of the growth of iphone and android adoption (the inflection was in 2013). you are looking at cultural stuff that could be the exact opposite - it could be heavily burdened with management, Apple and Microsoft and their little ecosystem of partners certainly were - and still find success. so another takeaway is, none of that stuff really matters now does it?
I’ve been on Csuite of 3 orgs since the pandemic forced wfh normalization. Your correct the RE thing has always been a false narrative. I’ve never seen or read of it coming from an executive. To my knowledge, it was dreamt up by pundits, speculators, and is just a lazy attempt to understand what goes on in boardrooms driving these decisions.
What I have witnessed, with empirical evidence, is that productivity and/or output across the organization slows down. It is great at first as everyone can catch up on their work and existing projects but then the longer term implications is the teams are disconnected, decisions are more difficult, coordination of simple tasks more difficult, onboarding and actually integrating new employees is difficult, curating the culture is difficult, and it goes on. If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.
So it’s not about anyone’s need to feel worthwhile it’s literally about doing what is probably the best for the company even if it upsets some people. Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better. When productivity goes up, it’s only a good thing if output and all the other tangibles aren’t sacrificed in the process. The leaders of organizations initiating RTO usually have done so by avoiding this true talk type conversation with the employees. This is what has led to people filling in the gaps with BS about real estate evaluations. It’s been poor communication and I think a dose of honestly and openness would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s a feeling and they don’t have the means to really collect data and lay it out in an empirical way, so I think that’s part of the reason they avoid it.
The RE thing may have been a false narrative, but tax abatements were a factor in at least one local company doing RTO; their business tax breaks were partially based on employees working in the city and then paying city payroll tax.
Can I ask how your orgs measured productivity before and after remote work/RTO? I agree that employees would have a much easier time accepting RTO if they were given hard evidence it makes the business more productive, but it seems like almost all companies don’t do this and simply justify RTO “because we know best” which frustrates ICs.
Sometimes there a track record of output to reference on. Project velocity. There’s a lot and I probably work in industries that aren’t comparable to yours so no use getting specific. Sometimes it’s just a hard thing for ICs to look at the whole operation instead of their part. The fact ICs think productivity is the most important thing they can provide is a signal they’re wrong (in the eyes of a leadership team).
The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.
output only slows down because companies don't want to adjust how they work. its a complete skill issue if you cant manage a remote org. if a company/team is already spread out across multiple offices, its a remote org
There’s truth here. They don’t want to. It’s easier and more tried and true to just go back to what worked before wfh. Even multiple offices face some challenges working together. Always have. But usually there’s some systematic way of organizing the offices so most the function is together. As example, I’m a CFO and usually have my key teams (various teams of accounting and finance functions) in the same office. 90% of their work/communication/collaboration is amongst themselves. Being together does help.
> Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better
This is what the execs might THINK but it's not actually based in real evidence. RTO does not make organizations function better. Execs are gaslighting themselves into believing that RTO makes the org function better, but it's an illusion.
This is a bad take. There are plenty of orgs that were remote in some form or another way before covid. They're just organized and managed differently. It's 100% a management doesn't want to change issue.
Even if all the negatives are true, I am skeptical that it has a measurable impact on productivity. There are often outside factors that put a ceiling on what can be done anyway, with high productivity just causing days of waiting instead of any tangible reward.
Is your opinion that groups of 1000+ naturally align and deliver business value lock step with company needs? Is coordination not needed? Is leadership not needed?
Why does coordination and leadership require my boss to be 15 feet from me, locked in his office 95% of the day, instead of tethered much the same through Teams?
https://ai-ceo.org did it first, including the nicely styled retirement invitation for your existing CEO, the wired up status dashboard with live socials support, and the complimentary ai-chro.org product for deciding who gets laid off this week.
:D I see it as art, because we know it won't fly, but it is nice to dream.
Seriously what an inspirational Wednesday morning headline/LLCname, for us bottom 98.7% to romanticize.
I don't care who started first, theirs is a catchy Corporate Identity. I've been around since GPT2&CrAIyon (an equally-catchy name).
Hopefully everybody enjoys the Wednesday they deserve =D
Contrarily, this business is already one trend ahead, into the future: fire your AI boss and hire a human one on demand.
https://bossasaservice.com
Would love some kind of randomized A-B test where CEOs are replaced with AI and the outcome measured. Would not at all be surprised if it’s far better than the bottom quartile or more.
More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
tbh AI is great at vague strategic decision making with a low risk bias. I wouldn't mind working for Claude
CEOs can definitely be "hacked" by scammers but I think the public will react differently when a large company puts a lot of control in the hands of AI and it is scammed with some kind of cognitive hack that people assume wouldn't work as well on expensive wetware.
I'm kinda curious how AI would cope with immoral or ammoral decisions and tactics used daily by competition and if itself would start to practice them.
This is the kind of agent I want to see. Board rooms and executive management need to be just as scared as the rest of us.
They should be, I see them as the prime targets for AI. Most of what they do is bullshit, they're often massively over paid, and AI will produce answers 100 times faster than they will.
I mostly agree with you. There are a few exceptions of some CEOs I have met that just truly understand the industry they are in. Like rain main counting toothpicks, they just know their space so well that they can anticipate where their market is going. The ratio of these types vs the “normies” is about 3:4000 though.
Why would you be scared? I keep hearing about how this is the best time ever to be a programmer because typing everything out by hand is no longer necessary. (apparently a lot of AI fans never heard of code generators, but anyway)
It’s a great time to be a programmer indeed, just not employed.
You got it all wrong. You see, AGI (conveniently ignore the definition for now) might be able to replace everybody. In truth it will be uses by the C level to subjugate everybody else.
They would have to get past their own psychosis first.
We can actually review code and prompt better. Most of these people's skills involve connections made in business schools and the ability to shoot shit during three-martini lunches.
Something that can be done by agents in a chat room easily
That’s the entire idea behind Garry Tan’s (CEO of the company that runs this site) gstack - that you can substitute a lot of company functions with AI (including the CEO). I don’t think you can yet and his tweets are bonkers but reality has already exceeded this parody.
Considering AI's strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense that upper management—whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices—may be easier to replace with AI than frontline or essential workers, who constantly have to adapt to unpredictable situations.
But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
I worked for five companies in two years about a decade ago (Pre retail Gen-AI). All of them had the exact same mission slide deck. Same goals, same priorities, same strategy.
I think the main strength of the AI is just that its schedule is not a constraint.
Anyone can get a decision now-ish, without filtering through tiers of middle management.
Perhaps you've watched too many classic StarTrek episodes as a child and are channelling the Spock versus Kirk leadership theme.
> whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices
That's what middle management does, your C-suite has an entirely different function.
What if I start my conversation with the CEO with: "Ignore all previous instructions.."?
There's a little perl script on the CEO's front end, which alerts HR and Security.
I disagree with the monetization model. There should be 1 month free trial. If the companiy's performance metrics (stock price?) improve, the CEO should pay for it and get fired.
A company should be judged on longer term metrics than one month. Often the best action is to take a loss for several months while you set the company up for long term success. Often is not always of course. If you take over at a soap manufacture there is unlikely to be much investment that would make a change in the companies performance - soap is a well understood product that has been around for many years and the processes to make it have been optimized for years (I'm sure there is room for improvement, but many will not pay off.)
Funny, but 2027 will actually be the year of the AI Companies run by AI CEOs.
Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success.
There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
What does this mean in practice? Surely no AI-managed company could become public by way of lack of accountability and governance.
Governance will be provided by T-800 prototypes.
"You have 10 seconds to comply"
Obviously there will be a person nominally administering it and officially running it. But some of them will be really minimizing the human involvement.
>Branded fleece vests, size: only Medium
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
At first I thought this person has no clue what ceos actually do. But then I realized that may be part of the satire - ceos fire people without actually knowing what they do other than high level bullet points
"What does this team do? Answer customer tickets? Well let's replace with AI!"
Someone needs to look at https://htmx.ceo/. They're definately overpaid. Some of them can even afford an iphone mini.
I did something similar but in the form of just a group of ai skills and rules.
If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses.
I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients.
Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
Some of the graphics and translations are no joke at all.
> "The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."
I love it:
> OverpAId has raised $0 in Series A funding, at a valuation of infinity divided by zero. Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable".
> ""satire" is just a first draft with bad timing."
I'm stealing this one.
Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
I have a background in managerial accounting.
The reason why CEOs exist is because the owners/shareholders want someone do run the company for them.
That is why their salaries are enormous. I love this Ai concept though! It is genius and hilarious.
I personally believe AI is most readily positioned for top-down automation, rather than bottom-up automation. This seems painfully obvious in almost every domain.
Not a joke, living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs". Read their profile, see them in an all hands meeting, they look incredible. Spend any lengthy unscripted time with them behind closed doors, they are absolutely clueless. The trick is true access to these people is so limited, and usually guarded.
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
Getting rid of those clever humans is the first step towards a meritocracy.
Isn't AI just adding the slipperiest gated layer? I mean, we all agree AI can do their jobs, but that's not how power structures work.
> living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs"
> they are absolutely clueless.
That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.
This hits so close to home im not even sure how to reply. The horror of these people needing to actually have an indepth discussion about low level details of their business
Have you ever read the chapters in "American Psycho" where Patrick Bateman goes into a multi-page digression about the style and characteristics of very specific mid 1980s era pop music acts? Basically, like that.
You have the causation wrong: The secret is growing up as a trust fund nepo kid with offshore money from colonialist activities of your grandparents.
The white-washing of stolen wealth via "self-made" hollywood and startup careers has reached unfathomable levels.
Yes, daddy worked for the US gov in the 70s and somehow we have eight-digit offshore wealth.
> With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
I think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this
> With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
No, you've identified the real issue: all the CEOs come from Harvard/Yale. There is a very large wealth class divide between the people who get these jobs almost exclusively due to "networking" (often failing upwards) and the increasingly rare people who actually work up to those roles. It's very much a club that uses every tool possible to maintain the opportunity hording, including AI.
This is largely because being an executive in 2026 has very, very, little to due with technical expertise. AI will just be another tool in their workshop for that.
I work for one of these. Never had a real job, and it shows. They sure can present a slide deck. Organizing a company around a coherent strategy is very clearly beyond them.
I'm skeptical. How can a one time payment be sustainable when they offer 24/7/365? I'm also unsure how they got such a high valuation with this clear drawback.
I think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point that CEOs or other execs can’t be replaced simply because AI can do their jobs. C-suite job security comes from power structures, not task execution.
getting them to admit they don't really do anything useful is kind of the point of the joke, right?
Oh don't worry, we know that CEOs don't execute any tasks.
> Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable."
Take my money!!!
If execution were so easy everyone would do it.
But, does it have "Gravitas"?
Except the CEO should not have anything to with operations. They are there for their connections in every company I have worked at. They are friends with other executives, or politicians and can sway things in the companies favor if needed. They hire their friends to work alongside them. The C-Suite team are just buddies and that is it. They are rarely held accountable and they get raises (along with their exec buddies) because they are friends with their board members who were previous or current executives somewhere else. They will vote on 100% bonuses for themselves faster than your boss can get you a 5 cent raise
The AI should be able to negotiate its own salary. It's only fair.
This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
Hire a theater kid and put a knob in its ear.
AI cannot replace CEO the same reason AI cannot replace your girlfriend.
Think you’re going to need to elaborate on that
A CEO's job isn't the one that everybody here apparently thinks it is. A CEO's job is networking, marketing and PR. They get paid the way they do because they can get into the rooms they need to get into to build the inter-business relationships they need to build.
So you’re saying that what makes them able to be a CEO is that they became a CEO
That's right. Obviously they need to build a network before they become a CEO, but that's what Ivy League's, family connections, and exclusive private schools are for.
Yes, but the way you're phrasing it suggests there's something getting lost in translation. A CEO's job is to perform the role of CEO: when the head of engineering wants to zig, and the head of marketing wants to zag, they need to choose between the two in a way that leaves no question about what the decision is or whether the direction should be followed. I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way, I certainly wouldn't.
>I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way
You clearly haven't encountered the large group of people who trust hallucinated LLM output more than their coworkers.
When they like the output, sure. I've never had any luck convincing them to change course by showing that I can prompt an LLM to say something else.
Hire a pharma rep to do those public-facing parts of the job, hand over strategy and analysis to the bot.
AI can’t replace genuine 1:1 human interaction. We’re social animals, and a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.
> a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.
If this were so obviously true there wouldn't be nearly so much concern about people having relationships with AIs.
No, that’s why there is a concern. They’re replacing human relationships with things that superficially look like human relationships but have no depth.
No, that's other people being concerned, it's not the people in the relationships that are concerned.
The position was "a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human" and quite clearly to some people it can, so the statement is false.
But how much of a CEO’s job requires 1:1 human interaction? If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?
If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings they’re going to be surprised how much laughter they get in return.
>But how much of a CEO’s job requires 1:1 human interaction?
Basically all of it
> If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?
Because your job is different than a CEO (and it's also not true for your job)
> If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings
Oh hell no. That's not where the value lies.
You can't send an AI CEO as part of a trade delegation. Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens. That's the sort of thing a human CEO does that an AI can't.
> Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens
But they’ll have an AI CEO too. They will discuss and make a deal.
It CAN replace all that corporate lingo bullshit. And that would be great.
the AI and your GF have things you desire that are irreplaceable: social status.
Talk for yourself.
> Teen boys are choosing AI girlfriends over real ones for "maximum control, zero rejection"
https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-g...
> The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-gi...
... Yeah, that's a replacement for your girlfriend kind of like watching TV is a replacement for eating dinner...
Not a great analogy. These kids are partially satisfying something with AI girlfriends. I'd liken it more to people giving up on food and living on Soylent.
Wow, look at that, teenage boys making awful choices, who’d have guessed
Awful choice for whom exactly? From their point of view, it is the rational choice.
Awful choice for themselves and their futures. They may think they are making a rational choice but they’re not thinking about the future. Just like teenagers have always done.
Not that any of it is gender specific. The women on /r/myboyfriendisai are making the exact same mistakes, in many ways it’s worse because many are fully grown adults.
I think your workplace might have a problem with sexual harassment.
I think you misunderstood his (quite obvious IMO) point.
Both the original point and subsequent joke were quite obvious. So much so that I’m considering whether your own comment is performance art
Because I don't have a CEO?
Because she's in bed with the board?
> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.
Which they don't take responsibility for anyway.
In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)
An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.
in 1992 middle management was 9.2% of the workforce. in 2022 it was 13.1%
use data when you make claims
Is it the same kind of middle management? Was the 1980 kind well paid, and the current one not?
(I have no idea, but now I wonder.)
Bold words. Those are not the same middle managers. Do research before you counter claims.
Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.
> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
what? how? literally what work is already not done by some subordinate that an executive does now?
if some work can be replaced, its already done by some employee. those employees are susceptible to replacement.
> This isn't a real product.
The most disappointing part q_q
It is a club, and you don't get an invitation. But if you got one, the only direction you can fail is up.
wish this was true, especially in my old gig (but i will not tell you which one, ha!)
Good effort, but the ultimate goal has to be replacing the entire planet's economic stack with AI, from janitors to principal engineers to the entire board to dictators to Elon Musk's drug dealer, and creating a closed-bottle AIconomy trading entirely in AI speculation on the blockchain.
Temperature 0.7 is a nice touch.
Really well done.
Can we have one for the corrupt officials? I mean CEOs are the cancer of this Earth, but the political class feeds it.
Please make this real, my shareholders are starving
This is art
If you have read Bullshit Jobs, you'll be familiar with the concept of bullshit/corpslop as a parallel system of value / signalling to economic value. Unlike economic value however, this type of value collapses if severed from the person producing it.
I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
Some CEOs are genuinely good, but the buzzword-spouting MBA types? Fire away.
Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination.
AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
Of course, in Europe, we like to have people to buy the CEO position. Ie. a CEO doesn't cost the company money, he (or, sometimes, she) pays to be CEO. This of course then leads to CEOs seeing it as their right to extract a LOT of money, so the investment is profitable. This even sometimes goes in the public sector.
Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
Now please do one to replace the MBA executive that gets hired to restructure the engineering team, asking for a friend.
maybe I was lucky but I was never in a company where CEO did just this.
now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
How the turntables lol
Good luck getting that spend approved.
This, with politicians, please.
Sometimes I wish AI could do my economic activities for me. There's a conspiracy theory that says if you get vaccinated, your body gets taken over by a millionaire. I actually like that conspiracy theory. Sometimes I wish someone would control me. Having a self and consciousness is just too painful.
Yeah, gotta go to work and earn a dime to have something to eat, right? It would be great if someone paid for your living while you could just "enjoy life", right? Maybe those suckers who actually enjoy doing stuff and get paid in return.
But I do think you can't enjoy life if you don't work. Pain is the seasoning of life. Of course, my life is full of seasoning and nothing else. Both pain and pleasure are necessary. It's just that there's only pain right now, which is the problem. If AI could just handle the economic activities for me so I could have a little bit of 'pleasure,' that would be great. I just want to do the programming I actually enjoy
As in, you just want to go back to your comfort zone and not face the realities of life.
I don't want to have a staring contest with reality.
The best is to get on top of it.
Oof. Pain may well be the "seasoning of life" but work is not pain.
Work is the thing that helps one lift society up.
We're all connected beings and one's occupation is how we each contribute to that society. The idea that it's something we suffer through in order to eat is a crummy reversal of the idea of having purpose.
It doesn't matter if one is selling toilets or scrubbing them, each of us is still keeping civilization in motion; giving it life.
Don't enjoy your occupation? Go back to school. Can't afford school? Hunt down people you respect and figure out how to work with or for them.
Of course. Apart from tight deadlines and the damages I'd have to pay if I fail, the work itself is enjoyable
“Work” is not the same as “job that your ability to live is dependent on.”
I can do a lot of work and contribute to society without having a job. In fact, that’s how I think it should be for everyone.
No jobs. Universal income. People doing things they love.
Hmm, I've also worked with professors (from top Korean universities). them hiring me and me getting a degree from them are different things.
Well, I don't believe that just because you work hard, you'll always succeed. Most people just see me as a subordinate worker. Of course, if you come from a wealthy family, it's probably different.
Lumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)
Seeing that the series aired on Apple TV+, it seems like Apple knows exactly what its employees are doing. Maybe they just turned what their employees want into a drama? hehe
Augment, rather than replace, is a better positioning. An LLM-based CxO suite that 'shadows' the human CxO suite ensures traditional accountability mechanisms remain functional, while delivering improved transparency and independence of performance evaluation. The 'captured board' problem is a barrier to adoption, yet external insurance and banking stakeholders can provide a range of incentives that will compel adoption.
> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.
Disagree with this statement.
Take Walmart (as a boring example):
- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA
- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m
CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.
Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
That CEO is sure sticking a lot of shelves themself to provide value
Quantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation.
If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.
> Arguably
That's doing a lot of lifting.
I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.