[bluGill]

The CEO is not a middleman. The CEO is the one who does the market research to decide if the market can absorb making 1000 widgets/hr, or if it will saturate and cause him to be unable to make payments on the robot and thus go bankrupt. The CEO is the one who decides if they put R&D into making widget 2.0 (which the robot wouldn't be able to make but the humans can), or if widget 2.0 couldn't be enough better to be worth the R&D and thus isn't worth it. The CEO is the one who sees competition coming from China and realizing he cannot compete and comes up with a plan to do something else so that as China is ramping up he is ramping down and transitioning.

The above is a very hard job with hundreds of places where some decision could be wrong. A good CEO generally makes enough good decisions that the company stays open for years, while a bad CEO will make decisions that cause the company to go out of business.

[crdoconnor]

>The CEO is the one who does the market research

In all of the companies I've worked at somebody else was paid to do that too.

That person was typically not overpaid.

[mbrodersen]

Where is the proof that CEO's make better than random decisions? Companies go bankrupt all the time.

[bluGill]

Steve Jobs.

Of course many ceos are a negative on the company. There are many studies on ceos, high priced ones generally are bad, while the unknown insider who moved up the ranks is probably good.