Back in the early 2000s I worked for a telco. Telecom was having a pretty rough time following the dot com crash. They replaced the previous CTO with a CTO that had a financial background (would have been suitable for as a CFO). This blew my mind at the time. The explanation was simply he's going to be less persuaded by seniors managers arguing for projects on technical merit and more persuaded by the dollars and cents. Rightly or wrongly, it worked, they got out of trouble early and when the economy turned around he was swiftly replaced by a hacker CTO.

One previous CTO of mine frequently told us he hadn't written a line of code since the late 1970s, and even then he hadn't done much. He didn't know what an SSH key was, didn't know the difference between FTP and HTTP, and hadn't heard of MySQL (this was mid 2000s).

He had two excellent abilities: convincing the board to give more money to IT, and hiring good people to spend the money wisely.

That's key to mgmt though it can be hard to hire people when you don't have the skills to judge.

Its hard to hire pepple you do have the skills to judge.

Sounds more like a COO than a CTO.

My experience comports with the parent. Most "CTO"s or "CIO"s I've met have a weak or non-existent technical background. I worked closely with a CTO whose only direct technical experience was a couple of CAD classes he took at a community college.

Generally, a CTO's tech "qualifications" are more from having some general knowledge about the technology ecosystem (e.g., they've managed software people before, and they know what Microsoft SQL Server is) than from any hands-on experience.

They will often be the type that have always been interested in gadgetry and tech, but basically only enough to subscribe to WIRED (back when that was a thing people did) and observe the industry casually. Not enough to get involved in the process themselves.

CxO is a fundamentally non-technical job, so I don't know what people expect from "technical" occupants. Technical people do poorly because the role is almost entirely subsumed by "business" responsibilities; that is, closing sales, talking to media/making presentations at conferences, sitting in meetings with lawyers and investors, setting budgets, and so forth.

Let me ask you, what is a "technical" CTO supposed to do?

seconded its like saying a non accountant CFO

An Oxymoron.