Because they already don't need a CEO to operate...
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board.
That's it.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board
This can't be stressed enough. Every since the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 which came from the Enron and Worldcom collapses, C-suite exists as the person to go to jail if shit really hits the fan.
The idea of the law was to hold companies accountable, instead all if has done is force companies to create more layers and places to point fingers, thus muddling everything and making to where no one can be held accountable.
At the same time, Chief officers now knowing that there's legal requirements, have just demanded outrageous pay and compensation because of the "massive risk" they are taking with any company.
I'm glad we have SOX, but boy has that law really missed the mark on what it was enacted to do.
This is my first time hearing the idea that SOX caused C-suite bloat and ballooned CEO salaries. A quick google suggests that CEO pay was already very high ~8 years before this: https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay
But I'm not an expert in the data and haven't looked closely; is there context I'm missing? Kinda seems like C-suite just started getting paid in stocks, and then we decided the stocks must go up (independently of SOX?).
CEO salaries were huge and often complained about long prior to SOX.
In the USA a law was passed to make CEO pay public for public companies. It was intended to shame the companies into lowering the salaries. CEO salaries skyrocketed. One guess was that "Our CEO must be the best, so we must pay the most to get the best."
This was long before SOX in 2002.
Not only this, but they all sit on each other's boards. There's essentially one big mega corporation:
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Excellent point. Modern CEOs are just the face of the marketing org. Maybe always have been.
Because they think they're special. They think that AI can reduce the number of programmers, the number of support staff, the number of sales agents, because AI allows fewer people to do more.
But there's only one CEO. One COO. One CIO. They cannot conceive of a company that operates without them, so they feel no threat at all. If they are replaced, they take their golden parachute and hop back on the executive carousel for another spin.
The Dunning-Kruger effect. CEOs (especially ones who joined the company long after it was successful) really don’t know how to do the job of most of their employees. Their lack of knowledge of those jobs leads them to vastly underestimate how complex they are.
At the same time, CEOs (hopefully) know how to do their own jobs which leads them to a more accurate assessment of AI’s ability to do the job: a total farce.
In truth, AIs aren’t likely to replace most jobs in any case because it’s all a house of cards.
I'm of the same opinion that AI won't be able to adequately replace many jobs, but only in the long term. In the short term I think it's going to be a bit of a bloodbath with a lot of companies drinking the kool aid until they realize it's not working.
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What CEOs never seem to grasp in that context is that they wouldn't just replace their workers with AI but also their customers... AI doesn't earn a wage and therefore can't spend it on (unnecessary) goods... No customer, no revenue. No revenue, no profits. No profit, no dividends.
Probably why they're working so hard on commoditizing basic necessities like food, water and housing into subscription based systems... 🤔
Exactly. Everything needs to be peak consumerism, or else their model of "line on the graph infinitely goes up" shatters. It's a Brave New World dystopia.
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You're talking about next quarter problems. Those aren't mine. I will be gone by then.
- Every capitalist ever
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Ironically, the job AI is most suited to replace is the CEO
All it takes is a Python script that replies to every email with some stock phrase like "we must work harder!", "we must trim the fat!", "we must be more innovative!" or some such bullshit. I could write that in half an hour.
In. New logo. Fire 30% of the workforce. Out.
You are now a fully trained management consultant.
CEOs could also be replaced by AI. And it would be hilarious.
Would be funny if they notice a correlation between employee wages and employee happiness and performance.
Wait, this model is paying based off inflation regular wage adjustments, fair market value, experience, AND overall contribution to the company?!?! How are we going to skim and grift when the employees are well paid?!
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Potentially more effective overall given how so many CEO decisions seem to result in terrible outcomes because they don't actually understand their product. Usually because they were hired into the company and industry, and have no actual experience with their product or how the company works.
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I'm going to die laughing the day investors tell Satya Nadella that they don't need him anymore and that the AI is going to make the administrative decisions.
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Because you can't use AI as a scapegoat and sack em with a golden parachute every time the company gets caught breaking the law.
Just use a bird like Mr. Burns did
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CEOs get paid to do what makes the most money.
The CEOs that will replace their own jobs want the payout of doing so, and don't care what happens after because they're rich.
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Was talking to an executive at my company the other week. He sincerely seemed to believe the "executive insight" was one of the very few jobs at the company that couldn't be done by an LLM. He predicted that he would probably lay off almost everyone under him by end of 2026 and just feed his amazing leadership ideas directly to an LLM to make happen.
Particularly a bit obnoxious as my usual experience about this guy is being called into customer meetings after he would meet with them. Usually the customer assumes we are a bunch of out if touch idiots if that is a "leader" in the company, and I'm one of the guys sales calls to have me reassure clients that they don't have to take anything he says too seriously, and we do actually have some competence.
Ai dOeSnT hAvE tHe CoNnEcTiOnS ThAt MaKeS a GrEaT CEO
Easy, replace all the CEOs at every company. Those are the connections. The computers can talk to each other to collaborate much faster than us mere humans. Tll
There's no possible bad scenario from this whatsoever.
Feed it the CEO's contact list and email history.
Zoom has literally been pushing this, just feed your whole work text and email history and contact list, generate an AI version of 'you', then send that AI avatar to write messages and 'have meetings' with other AI avatar of other people...
...and then send you, actual you, summaries of what was 'discussed' in these meetingd.
Is that happening this quarter or next? If not, its too far away to think about for them.
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Because they're not just CEOs, they're extremely wealthy CEOs with portfolios with deep investments in AI.
They're talking about replacing all their workers. The owners will still be ghouls.
Most of the rhetoric we see from businesses and news stations is for the ruling class, not us.
Because current 'ai' can't even run a vending machine business
Thats exactly what AI devs want CEOs to think.
LLM's loose relationship with reality and sycophantic behavior is plagiarized directly from the C-suite.
As soon as shareholders, and the board, feel an LLM agent can reliably do all the work of a CEO, the CEO will not need to exist. But the problem is that LLM agents require human supervision or intervention at irregular intervals. Since neither shareholders nor the board work full time, there still has to be someone to supervise and be available. The role of the CEO might change, and LLM agents might end up taking on a lot of the work they do. Maybe someday the CEO will mostly just be an "idea guy" that networks with other similar people to drum up deals and gets the LLM agent unstuck every once in a while. But it's very unlikely there will be no human in the loop during regular work hours.
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There's still a lot of work to do on AI before it's capable of such a highly specialized and demanding job. Training the model to reliably go for strategies of maximum greed and minimum ethics isn't easy.
Because it's not about productivity. It's about separating people into owners and toilers.
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He who has the gold makes the rules.
So they’ll keep their jobs. Until the AI decides to get rid of them, too, but they’ll have some CEO hunger games for those who want to be on the AI BOD. Under the control of the AI, of course.
Edit: CEO games like Robocop’s ED-209
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Who do you think is telling the CEO's to go full steam ahead on ai? The company I work for openly mocked ai...and then the stock price dropped. The investors said it was because they weren't investing in ai. Even CEO's, overpaid clowns though they may be, report to wall st.
CEOs are the easiest to replace with ai. And all you need to do is have it commit sexual harassment every once in an awhile and it will be a perfect replacement.
Hey thats not true. You'd also have to feed them a prompt about how they can space out enacting a fucking idiotic idea over 6 meetings.
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This is all kinda moot. There will be no companies to run when the economy crashes because there is no one to buy goods (or even to pay taxes to support government spending). It's a giant house of cards.
You hit the nail on the head
I think middle managers are way more at risk
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Just wait until they replace a CEO by an AI, and the company tanks. That is the only language those people understand to learn that AI is all about the A and none about the I.
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just because no one needs billionaires doesn't mean we will stop having them
It's a race to the bottom.
It doesn't matter if they think they'll be replaced or not, they feel like if they don't do it then they can't compete and they'll be out of the job even sooner.
Doesn't matter if their belief is well founded.
Because they're mostly brain-dead idiots
Because they think they are the ruling class, above working class which are just replaceable cogs in a machine. SMH
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