Inherited a "Yes-Man" CTO destroying our product. How do you survive a hype executive?

We just inherited a textbook "yes-man" CTO—a rich marketing guy playing dress-up as a tech leader. Instead of fixing our broken data systems, guiding team leads, or streamlining how we work, his entire playbook is saying yes to every half-baked idea from sales and the CEO.

He quietly trashed our entire data setup and forced everyone onto Databricks. Rumour has it he got a nice kickback for it, and now we're locked in so deep the exit barrier is higher than Mt Fuji. Product and design have been totally pushed to the sidelines, with design taking the brunt of his unexplained hate. He keeps forcing the team to pump out random, rushed features, turning our product into a total Frankenstein monster.

It genuinely hurts to watch him inflict this kind of irreversible damage on a product we built with care.

His favorite party trick? Showing Claude to the CEO. The founders now think he’s a tech genius for introducing basic AI tools that we would have picked up anyway. Naturally, he steals every ounce of credit when things go well, but drops the hammer on core teams the second something breaks.

The founders are completely blind to the circus because they're loving the honeymoon phase of an executive who never says no. But the second the AI hype dies down or the cracks get too big to hide, he’ll be the first out the door. With his family safety net and sky-high arrogance, he has zero reason to stick around and fix the mess.

It honestly hurts watching a kind, great company culture get dragged down by someone who treats core tech like a personal plaything.

How do you survive a boss with zero real engineering skills, zero empathy, and a master's degree in corporate brown-nosing? If anyone has successfully helped clueless founders see through a hype-driven exec without getting fired, I could really use a lifeline right now.