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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
This is actually how the world works
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
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.
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.
"proven talent"?
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.
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 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
https://bossasaservice.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
> 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.
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 think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this
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.
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?
If this were so obviously true there wouldn't be nearly so much concern about people having relationships with AIs.
> 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...
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.
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.
use data when you make claims
(I have no idea, but now I wonder.)
now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.