The CEO has a job, too, and that job is set by the board and/or the company's owners. And the most important job of the CEO is to be a good leader.
Was your CEO within his legal rights to ask you to do the job? Sure, assuming it was legal and not forbidden by your contract. Would it have been advisable for you to do it anyway, for the sake of your job? Probably. But that doesn't mean that the CEO was doing his job well by asking. And evidently he knew that, because he didn't actually fire you and the people protecting you.
In the case of Google, a public company, it is simultaneously true that individual low-level employees should act strategically and optimize for their own benefit - which might include putting up with misbehaving management to remain employed under them - and that the public has a strong interest in knowing when management, especially senior management, is being bad at their jobs.
I really don't think there's that much alignment in organizations in the sense you're speaking of. While it's nice to think that these places are acting in best interests of blahblahblah - I think selfish interests hold true more often than not and accountability is basically nigh impossible in our world.
We have so many people who have been abusing people in so much worse of ways than "write me a report on Russia" and they have little to no accountability.
The public doesn't care about how a company is managed - they care about the share price going up so they make their money.
> The public doesn’t care how a company is managed - they care about the share price going up so they make their money.
Thats like saying you don’t care about the fridge temperature of a restaurant, you care how quickly they get you your chicken Kiev.
> I don’t think there is much alignment…
Considering the fact that deepmind spends a significant amount on AI safety, a misalignment between their leadership and human values seems pretty concerning.
Was your CEO within his legal rights to ask you to do the job? Sure, assuming it was legal and not forbidden by your contract. Would it have been advisable for you to do it anyway, for the sake of your job? Probably. But that doesn't mean that the CEO was doing his job well by asking. And evidently he knew that, because he didn't actually fire you and the people protecting you.
In the case of Google, a public company, it is simultaneously true that individual low-level employees should act strategically and optimize for their own benefit - which might include putting up with misbehaving management to remain employed under them - and that the public has a strong interest in knowing when management, especially senior management, is being bad at their jobs.