Comment by wpietri
CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.
Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.
Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.
So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.