I’ve seen more than one CEO wear the “goofy uncle” mask and let other executives do the dirty work. I think they’d rather be seen as incompetent than take the heat for bad policies.
On the other hand, information flow seems like the hardest problem for any large org to solve. How do you actually know what the ground truth is when you’re the CEO of a company many with tens of thousands employees?
Obviously any exec who doesn't know how the company is being run is failing a pretty fundamental task, no real excuse possible.