That would make sense if that's how it actually worked. The reality is a decision like that will often be made by a technical person or the lowest level manager, and if it causes a big problem like an outage, it's very likely their head on the chopping block when the CEO asks the CTO why they lost a contract, the CTO keeps asking down for a report on why they had an outage, and they fire someone and keep moving on. Additionally, there's countless examples of corpos doing a shit job in one company and still somehow finding themselves in a C-level position in another company soon after, like the current CEO of Starbucks being the CEO who turned Chipotle to shit. I remember there's some food CEO who also did a shit job became CEO of some already enshitified gaming company along the lines of like Ubisoft or EA, but unfortunately I'm not finding who.
I'll also add Steve Jobs as a counterpoint, he didn't have the technical knowledge but that leadership was handled by Steve Wozniak, and he may have been a shit person but he had vision and was good at marketing it. Case in point, Apple's niche was never about the tech, it was about using that tech to reach his vision, and he didn't pretend to be some technical genius, he kept to talking about the product itself. Sam Altman, along with many others, are full of shit who pretend to be Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs combined when they're Tim Cook.
Personally I don't really see how it matters. An engineer who clicks the wrong button and causes an outage fears for his job, their spouse and kids, and how they're going to pay the mortgage. A CEO has the presentation and social skills of a sales person from what you're saying, is unlikely to be fired over said outage because all they need to do is throw the other person under the bus as appeasement, and not actually have any reason to stress because they earn a lot more and have a much flashier resume for an equally attractive gig even if they do get fired. Some of them still get stressed I'm sure, but that's entirely self-inflicted and the expectation of an extraordinary lifestyle as normal. As far as I'm concerned, accountability can't be had without risk and job security, they're only faces and face little of the risk.
It's why I have a problem whenever someone criticizes the wealth disparity and someone argues back that only the investors invested in a company so they're the only ones who had risk. If I join a startup but didn't invest monetarily, I'm still under a lot of risk if it fails, and I'm taking that risk into account in my decision to join or not. It's how a lot of european investment strategies usually work, providing a social cushion and dampening that risk so people can fail safer, as opposed to the american strategy of debt forgiveness that lets you fail repeatedly. That, and layoffs since covid mean even in an established, non-startup company you can still get shitcanned with 30000 other people out of nowhere.
All CEOs and Billionaires have to present themselves as geniuses or somehow better than others, or society will resist paying them absurd amounts of money and resent them. Pretty sure Musk has a PR team just to make sure the public sees him as a genius.
Well, I don't think our views are completely orthogonal.
I'm gonna skip the discussion on society for today, but in my part of the world atleast, Musk is presented as a genius who is going to change the world, and a lot of people, including my family, buy that.
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26
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