It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders.
If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.
Sure, if it allows owners to stay in control and keep profiting from the people that perform the labour in the organisation.
It's someone you can pin board and shareholder decisions on, as well as changes in market and accidents, that just goes away and lets some other people keep their power and profits instead of being accountable for their mistakes or lack of strategic performance.
But if it were just that, plenty of people would be willing to take the blame for less money.
I think the problem is you have to hire someone highly qualified and with relevant experience to at least show you're doing due diligence, and those people aren't cheap.
It has to be someone who looks somehow impressive, it can't just be a random homeless person doing it for a meal, that would look like the enterprise is doing something criminal.
Pay plays a part in that, it signals that the person is extraordinarily competent and all around great and important.
In large corporations CEO:s aren't very important, it's just one person who mainly collects and structures information from people closer to the work and makes public appearances on behalf of the corporation and does paper shuffling required by the state and so on. It's not rocket surgery. Using this person to protect the reputation and image of shareholders and the board as well is a 'no-brainer' decision to make if your interests are well served by it.
I very much dislike these threads where two people act like sockpuppets of a single not-very-advanced llm, agreeing with each other's views which are invariably exaggerated, uninformed and cynical. I've been seeing more of them recently; if you see one, downvote it.
American capitalism has lots of problems. The idea that CEOs "almost always" have no real-world experience is hardly worth arguing against: "almost always" is meaningless rhetoric and "real-world" likewise (what counts as real-world experience for Google? WPP? Northrop Grumman?). Jensen Huang is mentioned literally at the top of this thread and is an obvious counterexample.
Sorry, I don't mean for my views to hurt your feelings.
I find it obvious from the context that they were referring to celebrity CEO:s in global corporations and not Mom or Pop in some small mom-and-pop corner store.
When I look at en.wikipedia on Huang it seems he graduated into a managing role and then founded Nvidia. By "real-world experience" I'd mean experience as a worker, but I can't answer for the person you're actually quoting.
However, it's an interesting example. Clearly Huang has managed to promote an image to you that is very different from mine. As I see it, Nvidia is a main supplier of hardware for globally fashionable grifts and scams, like large portions of so called 'crypto' and 'AI'. I also expect Nvidia to be an important supplier in the war industry, and I'm sure it is in surveillance tyranny.
Huang started as a chip designer and then founded a company developing chips. What other kind of work experience would be relevant? AI contains scams, but also obviously important real progress; your points about war and surveillance are pure mood affiliation and irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Production of chips, for example. One could argue that design is a form of administration rather than work.
I'd say so called AI is largely a scam. It's wobbly databases with non-deterministic query languages dressed up as a substitute for intelligence. Email is similarly a scam. Through mail you send someone an item, which might or might not have some script on it. Email is very different, and it's largely used for spam, even though the name seems to say it is very similar. Is this what you call progress?
No, I'm pointing out that Nvidia are supplying criminals and tyrants with the tools they need for their abusive and oppressive activities. I do not expect your mood to change from having this pointed out, rather the opposite, I expect you to already be somewhat aware of it. Personally, I try to avoid doing business with such people, and I would prefer to not be dependent on their enablers, though that is almost impossible for systemic reasons.
Scam is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, no? If by scam, you mean that a large volume of the “work” enabled by these tools is not productive to society, then fine, I think what you say follows. However, there’s a lot of good work that is done with email and other tools you mentioned. For every good email I send, there might be 100 spam emails, but the drag from the spam on society is surely much less than the value of my “real” email. Furthermore, the technology is an improvement over snail mail for many use cases. I agree that the jury is still out on whether or not AI is as good as imagined, but it seems overly pessimistic to entirely discount a new technology that has been at least personally useful to me. If we were to really run with this definition of scam, we’d soon realize that all technology is a scam. So why even get up in the morning? Might be a simpler life to mail bombs and rot in prison at that point…
No, I don't think so. Most MLM:s are arguably scams, but they still persist as corporations and do a lot of business and make a lot of money for some people.
It's the dissonance between promise and delivery that make the term appropriate in my opinion. There's nothing intelligent about AI, and you can't transfer a package to a friend through email.
And, well, yes, one might argue that capitalism is basically a scam. Instead of serfs and slaves that were traded and exploited personally, we're now being traded and exploited collectively. I think Engels said this more succinctly at some point.
In general prisons are suppliers of cheap labour, and don't allow people to actually rot in them, though some inmates aren't actually supplied as labour, for reasons. As the person you're likely alluding to shows, grudge-laden manifestos and bombs don't do much to change society. It's a better idea to get organised around mutual aid and strikes in a wide sense.
When company valuations are fundamentally based on "faith to perform well", yes. It's a product of touting a speculative economy as one of "rational actors". CEOs function as mythological heroes more than anything. So there's no number too high to pay since even their defeat can be incorporated into the ongoing myth of the brand. It's very strange to me.
I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.
How’s this for a definition: the average CEO gets paid 350x what the average worker gets paid, so unless they’re generating 350x the value of the average employee, they’re underworking.
If they have 350 employees, then they double the company's profit, I suppose they just generated 350x times the value of an average employee. If they have more employees, they only need to increase it a smaller proportion to be generating 350x as much value.
If you have 10M of revenue and 9.5M of expenses then an increase of 500k in sales doubles your profit. Given that everybody in the company is needed (for sake of argument) to produce the initial 10M I wouldn't say that the CEO inking a new sale for 500k is worth the entirety of the original company.
Yes, if the 350 employees kept working the same as usual, and the only thing that changed was something the CEO did, not anything he ordered the employees to do.
Why that restriction? Deciding the direction employees work in is part of the CEO's job. If he directed them badly (say, to work on a project that fails because he misjudged the market), the company would make less money and it would be the CEO's fault.
Why should the employee with the CEO title get a raise for increasing company profits, while the employees without the CEO title do not get a raise for increasing company profits?
> the company would make less money and it would be the CEO's fault.
It would be the CEO's fault, and the workers who were not at fault would be fired when the company needs to tighten the belt.
The average CEO in the US gets paid FAANG SWE wages, per the US government's own data. Cherrypicking a handful of highly compensated CEOs out of the tens of thousands of large corporations in the US is misleading at best.
CEO's get paid by shareholders, workers get paid by companies.
The money that workers bring into a company is often not being used at all to pay these CEO's. It's why so many CEO's have $0 salary or $200k salary.
It's a critical distinction because it clears up so much confusion people have about this topic. Those 300x multiple stories you see are almost always comparing two completely different income sources. You can almost think of it like a 3rd party is paying the CEO to run the company.
There are things that needs inner insights to understand and conclude anything meaningful. And there are things that can be judge by external insights alone, or even only from external point of view not being embedded in the system internal consideration while trying to emit the judgement.
We don’t need deep packet inspection to spot a very out-of-the-chart huge traffic.
We don’t need micro-details of an economical agent actions to spot an anomaly in wealth distribution.
I would wager you could replace the CEO with a cardboard cutout and none of the employees, who actually produce the product which makes the company money, would notice.
You could probably get away with it for months, honestly.
If it's so easy, why aren't you doing it? Presumably it requires some amount of investment to break into, but with such a high upside it's still massively +EV.
By luck and status. Right place right time. They have some experience, and they just so happen to know X, Y, Z (probably because their dad knew X-1, Y-1, Z-1 and so on) so they get in. Maybe they went to harvard or something.
What opportunity manifests at the right place and right time? What's an example of this? And if it's based on knowledge and experience and an acquirable credential, then we're right back to square 1.
Its complex, because even if something is unattainable by knowledge and experience that DOES NOT mean its equal opportunity.
Simply being born into a richer family means you're significantly more likely to earn a higher education. Simply being born into a white family means you're more likely to finish high school.
And this is leaving out connections. If you know the people hiring, you have a better chance of getting hired. High-status people know other high-status people. If your family is high-status you're at a HUGE advantage.
That doesn't mean the opportunity "manifested" for you. But, it does mean your likelihood of obtaining said opportunity went higher.
I mean, when you look at the proportion of CEO's who are white, tall men as opposed to the regular population you notice that. It's an open secret. Some say its coincidence. I don't think anyone really believes that.
If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.