The middle managers can take turns as the Straw CEO for legal purposes. Or maybe someone can provide Straw CEO as a Service while living somewhere with few extradition treaties.

I believe the corporation itself is treated as a distinct legal entity for litigation purposes and shields officers of the company unless there are specific circumstances around any individual. I don’t think there is a legal requirement for a corporation to have a CEO. I think this just further confirms the idea of the CEO “role” being fully automated to be more than viable and a genuine costs savings. Much lower risk than relying on AI to replace skilled technical functions.

Someone with more corporate legal knowledge could provide further insight.

That would be the Board of directors for the company since they select the CEO or virtual equivalent. But current laws don't support bringing anything against a CEO for a company's wrongdoing. Even less for the board of directors.

Well, not quite. The corporation is a distinct legal entity, and is served a summons per se. For practical purposes of actually delivering the papers to a person, the corporation must have a designated representative. This may be anybody, and there are businesses that specialize in serving as the designated representative for perhaps hundreds of corporations. (Especially those that exist only as legal entities.) I know of one nearby me that's basically just a mailbox, even though it's listed as the address for many, many corporations.

The whole purpose of a corporate entity, as a legal concept, is to shield the directors, and officers, from personal liability. Unless personally named in a suit, a CEO almost never shows up in court. That's a job for an attorney.

I've seen from personal experience that the only thing worse than bad middle management is no middle management.

Getting called all the way up to the VPs office to try and explain some systems architecture to a guy who only knows how to say "But why doesn't it work?!" at you over and over again is... not fun.

Yes, but can they "synergise, the verticals, while hyperspeeding through deepdiving outside of the box thinking?" I think NOT

No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.

Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the "more hours worked means more things got done" thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.

Sure

A tech journalist sets up a company of all AI agents. CFO, CTO, HR, Sales, etc. He is following the capabilities advertised by all of the various vendors. He makes significant progress. He demonstrates that is is indeed possible. And some really absurd things happen along the way. Like the vendor advertising that agents are perfectly capable of this hanging up on one of them in disgust.