In July, the OverpAId website (overpaid.lol) appeared — a satirical project that positions itself as the «world’s first CEO replacement engine» and proposes replacing the company’s CEO with AI and distributing his salary among employees.
In July, the OverpAId website (overpaid.lol) appeared — a satirical project that positions itself as the «world’s first CEO replacement engine» and proposes replacing the company’s CEO with AI and distributing his salary among employees.
The landing page is made one-to-one in the format of a typical AI SaaS product launch — with the «old» price crossed out, an «as featured in» banner (where it is honestly stated in parentheses that none of the listed media outlets actually wrote about the service), and an «activity counter» that compares the decisions of the real director with those of OverpAId.
Among the claimed capabilities are a generator of corporate jargon in bingo format (circle back, north star, boil the ocean, synergy), a translator of press releases about AI into human language, a widget to «talk to a real director» (which, of course, does not work), and a calculator that shows how much additional bonus each employee would receive if the CEO’s salary were divided equally between the team.
The site even has a «board of directors» — a fictional one, with members like Context Window, Ctrl+Z, Temperature 0.7, Exponential Backoff, and Empty Seat (a position that was rejected by venture capitalists). And a comparison chart contrasts the speed of decision-making: 3–6 weeks for a human director versus 0.004 seconds for an AI, and an $80 million golden parachute versus the git revert team.
According to the website, the rates look like this:
The authors also joke that the project «raised $0 in a Series A round for estimates of infinity divided by zero.»
Despite its ironic format, the site is built on real numbers: the average CEO pay in S&P 500 companies is 290 times higher than the average employee’s salary, and over the past 40 years, top managers’ compensation has increased by more than 1,000%, while the salaries of ordinary workers have remained virtually unchanged. There is a clear disclaimer at the bottom of the page: OverpAId is not a real product, but a satire designed to show the gap between the value that an individual manager actually creates and his disproportionate compensation, as well as to question the «trickle-down» effect — the idea that enriching the richest over time benefits everyone else.
The project appeared against the backdrop of companies massively reducing staff, explaining this by the introduction of AI — and the site turns this logic 180 degrees, proposing to apply it not to ordinary employees, but to management.
