If you're Zuck or anyone working for FB, that'd be true. But what if one of my interests in running my company is the protection of my users' data?

Can you imagine yourself trying to convince a regulator of that?

Like Zuck before senate?

I imagine when running a business one faces many stupid bureaucrats, this could be another one (or they could be competent and understand and accept the technical explanation of how my imaginary company complies with GDPR).

But yeah, why quit because of the n + 1th bureaucrat, when you've dealt with n of them while starting and running of your business?

> Like Zuck before senate?

No, like Google, Microsoft and Intel before the European Commission.

> Being the sole owner and manager and being the DPO is clearly a conflict of interest.

Could you clarify why you think this is so? As an owner, my interests would align with the DPO's interests so it's hard to me to find where the conflict of interest would reside in the case of being the sole employee _and_ DPO.

Now if it's a large company where they make money per GDPR policy workaround then I could see it being required another person than the owner, but it could still certainly be an employee.

No, as an owner your interests do not necessarily align with the DPO. They might, but they do no necessarily.

If you're selling your stored PII to third parties without user consent then yes, it would be.