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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to be missing the point of the role of the CEO.

The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.

No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.

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Yes, this is actually a reason why an AI executive could be a formidable alternative in theory.

The CEO is ultimately an employee of the board, and managing the CEO with respect to the board's oversight and interest is a somewhat adversarial challenge.

However, the AI CEO's intentions are fully transparent to the board and entirely pliable to the board's demands. The AI CEO also offers the board the opportunity to retain significant equity shares that materially impact their wealth - in this way AI executives stand to be an even more tantalizing target than fixed labor costs.

Of course, this presumes LLMs will become reliable enough for this, which doesn't seem likely.

I would argue that many companies would in fact be better off disappearing for a year, rather than constantly thrashing the company to chase the latest trend.

And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...

> should be able to disappear for a year

But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off

If a ceo can disappear for months and still return into a company that isn't on fire,it means they have a functional company. It means there are processes and people in right places to run things in a continuous manner. This isn't as common as people might think. I've seen many companies where people can't survive for a few days without ceo because the position is tied to a million things( often unnecessarily). There's an old saying about owning a business: if you leave and it still runs it means you have a business, otherwise it's just a job

Right, if a janitor can leave the hallways for a week and they're still clean on his return we should let him go

Yes. Your point is?

That the janitor did a good job cleaning the hallways and building enough of a reputation amongst those in the building to not trash the hallways

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