It sounds like a lot of passive-aggressive behavior on everyone's end and observing from the sidelines without bringing things up like an adult.
Conflict is good in healthy doses.
But if a disgruntled employee can't even maturely say "Look we've got a problem. This is the way I see things and this is the reason I disagree with you, nothing personal...", then there's a problem with culture.
A CEO, or any decent leader, needs to be decisive, communicative and live with the consequences and risks of a decision while learning post hoc. People do get territorial. People do act like dicks. People do threaten to quit. Be a leader and learn to manage these people and situations. Firing someone or moving someone to a corner without first talking to them is a pretty dickish move too.
A good CEO will hire people that complement his or her skills.
If you're too worried about directly confronting someone who is too valuable to you, at some point you should hire someone with the people skills to diffuse these situations in a way that minimizes the damage.
I've seen a lot of snakes, but in my experience it is more common for them to be incompetents - throwing wrenches into productive people's work to distract from the fact they are a fraud. UX and marketing people are the most common because it's harder to be a poser programmer and not get caught (though I've seen several of those as well.)
I witnessed (not where I worked, but where my roommate and some very close friends worked, also I know the "culprits") a even worst case:
A a savant-snake that obeys someone else for non-professional reasons.
In that case, I saw a company start to make awesome game (they were not a game company), the CEO (that was a savant-snake) then got engaged to a woman that insisted in visiting their studios, and giving her "opinion" (it was no opinion, because then her future husband would quickly agree with it, and force the team to do whatever she wanted).
This very quickly derailed the project... In fact, it ended derailing the whole company, they went from absurd profitability (the MMO game idea was just to burn excessive amounts of money in a way that maybe gave profit to them) to bankruptcy, just because one new person (the CEO girlfriend, now wife)
