You can be the chief officer of a 1 person organization, or a 100,000 organization. Or pick another dimension such as SLOC, number of projects/products, teams,

You can be the chief officer of a 1 person organization, or a 100,000 organization. Or pick another dimension such as SLOC, number of projects/products, teams, DAU, etc. CTO has a different meaning at different levels of scale. With a headcount of around 250 employees, you can still work directly on implementation. But with a headcount of 100,000, it doesn't make sense.