I report to the CTO, but I have a lot of clout with the founders. I would say I am even friends with them. They certainly respect me. I feel the current CTO may

I report to the CTO, but I have a lot of clout with the founders. I would say I am even friends with them. They certainly respect me. I feel the current CTO may even feel threatened by me because I helped the company through some awful prior tech leadership issues and I'm sure he knows about that. How would I discreetly escalate this? I really don't want to be a snake here. I have thought about saying "I need to work somewhere else in the company as I can't buy these changes" but the issue with the CTO now is he doesn't want a product unlike his vision for how it is set up. This product is my product and it is very simple in terms of deployments and config. So there is no room for that, unless I somehow pivot into a non-tech role or a tech-adjacent role like QA or something which sounds unpalatable.