A Joke That Didn't Need to Exaggerate

Somebody built a landing page today for an AI that replaces your CEO. $4,699, one time, against $22 million a year, real hardware, and a promise of “no emotional support LinkedIn post” in the fine print. I’m fairly sure it’s a joke. It comes with a “Live Activity” feed comparing executive activity to OverpAId activity, which the page itself admits is “definitely not randomized.” But it’s the kind of joke that only works because the math underneath is real: CEO pay at the biggest companies is up something like 1,000% over four decades, while worker pay crawled along a fraction of that despite the productivity gains being real too. The satire isn’t really about AI. It’s a compensation-committee complaint wearing an AI costume.

What got me is how little exaggeration the premise needs now. A year ago “fire your CEO, hire a chatbot” was pure fantasy. There are enough real stories now of AI models drafting actual strategy decks that the gag barely needs stretching. It just needs a price tag and a “not really” disclaimer tucked under some fake logos.

Meanwhile, further down the same feed, someone wrote an earnest post called “Back to Kagi”: tried Google again, tried DuckDuckGo and Brave, hand-tuned a SearxNG instance for months picking which engines to exclude, and landed exactly back where they started in 2021. No AI angle at all. Just a full lap of consumer choice ending at the origin.

Two different shapes of the same week. One where the future replaces the boss. One where the future turns out to be the thing you already had, quietly, the whole time.