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Comment by raydiatian | Hacker News Reader

If a rocket company CEO can be replaced by an e-tail company exec, what do CEOs do that warrant such high earnings again

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There a few snarky answers to your question but the real answer is simple: what CEOs do is extremely hard, they don't just need to build a rocket, they need to build a 1,000 person team capable of producing rockets. Despite what some people may think there's no 1 person who has all the knowledge required to put a rocket into space, so the CEO is responsible for bringing all that knowledge together. Take a look at the flip-side - this bad CEO has been basically fired, how many billions of dollars do you think he cost Bezos through his failure? Would you have paid someone twice his salary if you thought they could do better?

Yeah a good ceo would have saved a ton of money but where are you going to find one? It’s not like the system produces people who effectively quash toxic managing culture. More than likely the system and incentives actually promote the most toxic folks to the top. You would probably have equal or better results by promoting a promising mid level leader that’s still in touch with the group floor reality.

It depends on the situation. There are cases where the organization wants to do everything and you need a leader who will force them to prioritize. There are cases where you have several internal groups with competing objectives and need a leader who can get them to cooperate. There are cases where everyone is already moving in the right direction and you need a leader who will take all the stops out. There are cases where bold and perhaps unpopular decisions need to be made and seen through.

If you have a CEO who is currently stingy about making process improvements that aren't sexy and is focused largely on office politics and that's not what the company needs at the moment, promoting someone who has been down in the trenches is a great option. Conversely if a company is bloated and needs to tighten its belt to survive, you might want someone who can look at it as dispassionately as possible. Really you can't look at it in terms of good or bad ceo, but rather appropriate or inappropriate.

There are often just bad ceo hires. It’s not always about picking the best tool for the best situation sometimes it’s just some dude that padded his resume the best, and got lucky to be in the right place at the right time who was likable by the right group on the board. There are a lot of duds out there that come in talk a big game and then leave a mess in their wake. In blues case though this guy was hand chosen by Besos so the only property that matters is being liked by Jeff. So who knows what he saw in him.

> what CEOs do is extremely hard, they don't just need to build a rocket, they need to build a 1,000 person team capable of producing rockets

Maybe you could argue this is what they should be doing, but it's clearly not what they are doing. The vast majority of CEOs simply suck some of the blood out of the company before flying off an parasitizing another one. You say the other answers are snarky; I say yours is naive.

> Would you have paid someone twice his salary if you thought they could do better?

No, I would have paid a random engineer who didn't want the job 1/10th of the CEO's salary and gotten a TREMENDOUSLY better outcome.

Found the CEO

Nothing much really. It is just they know a guy personally who can pay their high salary. If you know also someone like that just go get your high earning.

They remind us that we are all gorillas more quickly than others.

They network very effectively with other high net worth people

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