OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

by ignaloidas • 11 hours ago

634 323 11 hours ago

jdw646• 10 hours ago

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.

throw12345678913• 10 hours ago

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.

jdw646• 10 hours ago

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

mFixman• 10 hours ago

Lumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)

jdw646• 10 hours ago

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

ForHackernews4• 10 hours ago

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?

21asdffdsa12• 10 hours ago

Hire a theater kid and put a knob in its ear.

vachina• 10 hours ago

AI cannot replace CEO the same reason AI cannot replace your girlfriend.

afavour9• 10 hours ago

Think you’re going to need to elaborate on that

dist-epoch• 10 hours ago

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...

meindnoch• 10 hours ago

I think your workplace might have a problem with sexual harassment.

chucksmash• 10 hours ago

Because I don't have a CEO?

ForHackernews4• 6 hours ago

Because she's in bed with the board?

helsinkiandrew• 10 hours ago

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.

happymellon2• 9 hours ago

Which they don't take responsibility for anyway.

b1122• 10 hours ago

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.

JohnHaugeland• 10 hours ago

in 1992 middle management was 9.2% of the workforce. in 2022 it was 13.1%

use data when you make claims

simianwords2• 8 hours ago

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.

mcrk• 10 hours ago

Someone needs to look at https://htmx.ceo/. They're definately overpaid. Some of them can even afford an iphone mini.

gmerc• 10 hours ago

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.

iugtmkbdfil834• 10 hours ago

:D I see it as art, because we know it won't fly, but it is nice to dream.

ProllyInfamous• 10 hours ago

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

mikert8910• 10 hours ago

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

Waterluvian• 10 hours ago

Getting rid of those clever humans is the first step towards a meritocracy.

cyanydeez2• 10 hours ago

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.

walrus012• 10 hours ago

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.

mikert8910• 10 hours ago

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

bflesch• 10 hours ago

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.

ronbenton2• 10 hours ago

With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy

I think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this

beezlebroxxxxxx• 10 hours ago

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.

NeutralCrane• 8 hours ago

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.

mpeg• 10 hours ago

Now please do one to replace the MBA executive that gets hired to restructure the engineering team, asking for a friend.

virajk_31• 10 hours ago

How the turntables lol

spwa4• 10 hours ago

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 ...

bawana• 10 hours ago

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.

bluGill3• 9 hours ago

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.)

keiferski• 10 hours ago

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

morelandjs• 10 hours ago

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.

jascha_eng• 10 hours ago

tbh AI is great at vague strategic decision making with a low risk bias. I wouldn't mind working for Claude

piguin• 10 hours ago

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.

hsuduebc2• 9 hours ago

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.

ronbenton2• 10 hours ago

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.

nemomarx• 10 hours ago

getting them to admit they don't really do anything useful is kind of the point of the joke, right?

happymellon2• 10 hours ago

Oh don't worry, we know that CEOs don't execute any tasks.

puszczyk• 10 hours ago

wish this was true, especially in my old gig (but i will not tell you which one, ha!)

reactordev5• 10 hours ago

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.

datakan• 9 hours ago

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.

reactordev5• 9 hours ago

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.

panny• 9 hours ago

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)

reactordev5• 9 hours ago

It’s a great time to be a programmer indeed, just not employed.

gherkinnn• 9 hours ago

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.

reactordev5• 8 hours ago

They would have to get past their own psychosis first.

renegade-otter2• 8 hours ago

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.

reactordev5• 6 hours ago

Something that can be done by agents in a chat room easily

CGP_Labs• 10 hours ago

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.

runamuck• 9 hours ago

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.

neutronicus• 9 hours ago

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.

DrScientist2• 9 hours ago

Perhaps you've watched too many classic StarTrek episodes as a child and are channelling the Spock versus Kirk leadership theme.

CSMastermind• 8 hours ago

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.

bratao• 10 hours ago

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.

zpeti• 10 hours ago

Unfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.

melenaboija• 9 hours ago

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.

SecretDreams• 9 hours ago

I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.

mikert8910• 9 hours ago

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

bluGill3• 9 hours ago

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.

bko2• 9 hours ago

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.

pj_mukh2• 9 hours ago

"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.

sumanthvepa• 8 hours ago

Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .

dexterdog• 8 hours ago

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?

liveoneggs• 9 hours ago

Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?

"proven talent"?

tgv• 9 hours ago

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.

hibikir• 9 hours ago

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.

groundzeros20158• 9 hours ago

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.

andrewmutz• 9 hours ago

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

scotty792• 8 hours ago

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.

mc32• 8 hours ago

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.

LPisGood• 7 hours ago

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.

hoppp• 9 hours ago

Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.

jedberg• 9 hours ago

Steve Jobs was hired as the CEO of Apple when the company was 20 years old. He was never CEO before that.

cmiles743• 9 hours ago

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.

cyclopeanutopia5• 9 hours ago

"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?

ImHereToVote• 9 hours ago

I'm not OP but I think it is both normal, proper, and desirable.

andsoitis4• 9 hours ago

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?

bonoboTP2• 9 hours ago

Sounds a bit like casting lingo in performing arts, but other than that, not sure what you're hinting at.

mb7733• 9 hours ago

... What are you getting at, I'm genuinely curious? What's wrong with the phrase "top talent"!?

groundzeros20158• 9 hours ago

Yes. Highly accountable and responsible people with deep knowledge are rare.

epolanski• 9 hours ago

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.

aqme282• 9 hours ago

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.

fragmede2• 9 hours ago

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.

frr149• 9 hours ago

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

giancarlostoro• 9 hours ago

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.

thelastgallon• 9 hours ago

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) .....

afavour9• 9 hours ago

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.

adamtaylor_13• 9 hours ago

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.

andsoitis4• 9 hours ago

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.

blueTiger33• 9 hours ago

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?

bonoboTP2• 9 hours ago

What matters is their connections to powerful people. That's what you buy.

palata3• 9 hours ago

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.

randusername• 9 hours ago

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?

croes2• 9 hours ago

How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles?

Those with the higher price tag are better /s

palata3• 9 hours ago

Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.

It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".

afavour9• 9 hours ago

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?”

pickleglitch• 9 hours ago

If the past decade has taught me anything, it's that today's satire is tomorrow's reality.

iamleppert• 9 hours ago

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.

baggachipz• 9 hours ago

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.

Trasmatta2• 6 hours ago

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!

croes2• 9 hours ago

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?

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 hours ago

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.

DrScientist2• 9 hours ago

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.

blitzar2• 9 hours ago

But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.

thenatureboy• 9 hours ago

Whoa there buddy, you are highlighting that true talent, like beauty, actually does exist. This kind of thinking is not tolerable on Hacker News.

stego-tech• 9 hours ago

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.

9999000009992• 8 hours ago

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.

plagiarist• 8 hours ago

That's the point isn't it? You overpay a wealthy dude with connections to gain a node on nepotism graph.

bluecheese4522• 9 hours ago

Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?

hdndjsbbs• 9 hours ago

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.

renegade-otter2• 8 hours ago

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.

phkahler• 8 hours ago

the quality gap between an average hire and top talent ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶ is night and day.

Fixed that for ya.

jdlshore• 8 hours ago

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?

criddell• 8 hours ago

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.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 8 hours ago

Most CEOs are not Lisa Su or Steve Jobs, or even remotely close. Current AI could surely do better than the majority of them.

elzbardico2• 8 hours ago

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.

safira_day• 8 hours ago

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.

dzonga• 8 hours ago

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.

ncr1002• 8 hours ago

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?

rurp• 1 hour ago

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?

arjie• 10 hours ago

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.

seydor• 10 hours ago

The AI should be able to negotiate its own salary. It's only fair.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder• 9 hours ago

This is art

kkarpkkarp• 9 hours ago

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?

jackb4040• 9 hours ago

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.

amazingamazing• 9 hours ago

If execution were so easy everyone would do it.

karel-3d• 9 hours ago

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.

winwang• 9 hours ago

This isn't a real product.

The most disappointing part q_q

nacozarina• 9 hours ago

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.

j1elo• 9 hours ago

Some of the graphics and translations are no joke at all.

"The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."

deltarholamda• 9 hours ago

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!

glitchc• 9 hours ago

Good luck getting that spend approved.

ilaksh2• 9 hours ago

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.

skinfaxi• 9 hours ago

What does this mean in practice? Surely no AI-managed company could become public by way of lack of accountability and governance.

Razengan• 8 hours ago

Governance will be provided by T-800 prototypes.

ilaksh2• 6 hours ago

Obviously there will be a person nominally administering it and officially running it. But some of them will be really minimizing the human involvement.

cmiles8• 9 hours ago

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.

dgrabla• 9 hours ago

This, with politicians, please.

pknerd• 9 hours ago

What if I start my conversation with the CEO with: "Ignore all previous instructions.."?

bell-cot• 8 hours ago

There's a little perl script on the CEO's front end, which alerts HR and Security.

xgulfie• 8 hours ago

Please make this real, my shareholders are starving

Closi2• 8 hours ago

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'

miltonlost• 8 hours ago

That CEO is sure sticking a lot of shelves themself to provide value

Closi2• 8 hours ago

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.

nathas• 8 hours ago

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.

tonic_note• 8 hours ago

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.

iterateoften• 8 hours ago

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

cjbgkagh• 8 hours ago

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.

LearnYouALisp3• 7 hours ago

Could learn from Japanese CEOs to an extent right?

ratelimitsteve• 8 hours ago

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.

goldbaronyx• 8 hours ago

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.

doctorpangloss• 5 hours ago

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?

conductr3• 8 hours ago

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.

whaleofatw2022• 7 hours ago

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.

karagenit• 7 hours ago

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.

notfromhere2• 7 hours ago

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

Trasmatta2• 6 hours ago

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.

seany• 6 hours ago

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.

licjon• 2 hours ago

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.

gmadsen• 7 hours ago

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?

Lord-Jobo• 7 hours ago

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?

elzbardico2• 8 hours ago

It is a club, and you don't get an invitation. But if you got one, the only direction you can fail is up.

phtrivier• 8 hours ago

""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.

bob1029• 8 hours ago

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.

4lx87• 8 hours ago

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…

zamadatix• 7 hours ago

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.

mook• 7 hours ago

Interesting. At a smaller company I worked at, the CEO was a sales role, as far as I could tell.

cristi_baluta• 6 hours ago

The only thing that i know that my ceo did was to sell his company, that went to shit after that

notfromhere2• 7 hours ago

sure, that doesn't mean pay is justified

RajT88• 7 hours ago

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.

darth_avocado• 7 hours ago

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?

LearnYouALisp3• 7 hours ago

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).

raincom• 6 hours ago

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.

aleksandrm• 6 hours ago

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.

mathattack• 7 hours ago

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.

miyoji• 7 hours ago

The original post is surely satire.

Yes, they say so at the bottom of the page.

reinitctxoffset• 6 hours ago

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.

qznc• 6 hours ago

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.

RunSet• 6 hours ago

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.

Hizonner• 4 hours ago

Even acknowledging fault is a poor substitute for not fucking up in the first place.

mattertoast• 4 hours ago

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"

Flightmussy• 8 hours ago

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.

karussell• 8 hours ago

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.

iJohnDoe• 7 hours ago

Really well done.

xivzgrev• 7 hours ago

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!"

system2• 7 hours ago

Temperature 0.7 is a nice touch.

trolleski• 7 hours ago

Can we have one for the corrupt officials? I mean CEOs are the cancer of this Earth, but the political class feeds it.

_8L34K• 7 hours ago

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.

ninju• 6 hours ago

Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable."

Take my money!!!

neuronexmachina• 6 hours ago

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".

joey64• 6 hours ago

But, does it have "Gravitas"?

cricketsandmops• 6 hours ago

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

OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

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