as someone who deals directly with these CEOs and their startups/small companies, no it doesn't surprise me. I deal with them on a daily basis. they're all collectively idiots that somehow fell into a barrel full of thumbs and came out sucking tits. They learned catch phrases and linkedin buzzwords and have the ability to con investors who are arguably more stupid than the CEOs.

My entire lively hood is based purely off their collective idiocy. they utilize AI/LLM's for builds, they fire virtually all their senior dev teams, then when things naturally go south they hire me to come in and pay me, honeslty, WAY more than I should be paid to code review their AI slop and tell them how fucked they are. that's literally my job now. All they know are buzzwords and the ability to throw money at a problem that will then hopefully vanish but it never does.

I've had conversations with some of these morons where they've openly admitted to me that they "asked chatgpt and it said we should do this and this" so this CEO asking chatgpt for legal advice does not surprise me at all.

What i've learned is to get ahead in life all you need to do is abandon all your ethics and morals, learn some catchy buzzwords, and be a complete moron. The world then rewards you for it.

I naturally assume there's a distinct lack of humanity and a willingness to act like a psychopath with them.

I think the will to fuck anyone over for more advancement is the biggest factor here.

You misspelled being related to the previous CEO or a good friend of theirs.

Someone straight up getting promoted to CEO from below is a bit more rare. They usually have been a CEO somewhere else before that due to relations.