You may have never met the CEO, but I am sure that the CEO or founder was not living in a cave the entire time. They may not have talked to you, but they certainly had their inner circle built in-person at some point.
Also, if you had to pick a year for when we see the first AI-controlled company with at least $100M in assets under its control, what date would you pick?
I'm reminded of the 2010s when people said an AI would never be able to break from its box and be connected to the internet, and then in the 2020s the first thing the AI companies did was offer AIs as online services. I expect in the 2030s fund managers will be eager to hand control of their billions to AI, so how the AI gets control of funds and a corporation is hardly an obstacle.
I operated as a one-man bootstrapped startup for many years. And now it's just one man plus AI, which has made me much more productive. It's pretty much fully AI-controlled, depending on how you define it. But I still consider myself the owner of my own startup. AI is not the owner.
And yes, as a person who runs a fully online one-person startup, I know that it is impossible to do everything online.
You have a small company but when there's more money and business at stake, owners often delegate decision making to hired people. Decisions that engage sometimes billions of dollars in resources.
You can easily imagine that owners of a successful business at some point might forgo putting a human in charge of their investment and let AI manage it instead. And while technically AI wouldn't own anything, it would be in power to decide what the billions of dollars get spent on, with no human supervision as long as the bottom line looks decent.