I read this paragraph from the article twice, I think it backs my point, meaning that people like Levchin put their company's and investors' interests first and foremost before the interests of people which are their employees (I generally tend to ignore the "compassion" in speeches like this, I cannot pay rent or my bills with "compassion" once I'm out of a job).

I'm not saying that what Levchin (or any-other person in his situation) does is bad, because that's what capitalism is all about, I just wanted to say that we shouldn't foul ourselves in thinking that the employer-employee relationship is a "Hare Krishna"-type of thing.

I have no idea if Levchin meant what he said, but I'm pretty sure he said what he said.

Expanding on your point:

While it may be reasonable to extrapolate (provisionally) some of the iotas $NAME cares about in his role as an investor, care should be taken to avoid conflating $NAME-the-investor with $NAME-the-person, about whom there is probably less evidence from which to draw conclusions.

This is particularly important to keep in mind since, even though $NAME-the-person likely influences the behavior of $NAME-the-investor, there are very good reasons for $NAME to avoid signaling the extent of that influence.

    “[Mayer] is by far the hardest working person in Silicon Valley,”
    Max Levchin told Pando’s Sarah Lacy. “She gave birth to twins and
    then traded emails with me about a feature of a product she was
    launching in a week, within, from what I could tell, 20 minutes
    of giving birth,” said the PayPal cofounder, speaking before a
    group of people. 

    The audience tittered. “She is intensely committed to her cause.
    She’s awesome,” said Levchin, who is now devoted mainly to a new
    consumer finance startup called Affirm. He also talked about how
    much he respects Mayer for being a pioneer and one of the few
    women to ascend to such a high level in tech. “She is a woman
    who rose through the ranks in the male-dominated world,” he
    said. “I think that’s pretty special.”

    Levchin’s comments do more than just celebrate his friend,
    though. Applauding such an extreme work ethic sends a pretty
    clear message to those interested in growing and developing 
    their careers: Work all the time and give up everything if
    you want to succeed. 

    "[Mayer] is by far the hardest working person in Silicon Valley.
    She gave birth to twins and then traded emails with me about a
    feature of a product she was launching in a week, within, from
    what I could tell, 20 minutes of giving birth. She is intensely
    committed to her cause. She’s awesome."

You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from that, but that sounds wildly unhealthy to me, and is nothing I would ever want anyone working for me—or anyone I work for—to venerate.

That's not a convincing response to a call for more careful thinking. In fact, it's arguably not thinking at all. It's a game of labels, seeking an emotional payoff.

dang: "You can't possibly know what iotas someone else cares about"

aaronbrethorst: Here's a quote that describes what Levchin cares about.

greglindahl: "Here you have a Huffington Post editor getting extremely close to putting words into someone else's mouth"

aaronbrethorst: Here's just the quote that describes what Levchin cares about.

dang: "You completely changed the subject"

I give up.

Many users come to internet forums to release pent-up emotional energy at their favourite symbolic targets. Monkeys do that too, only with feces rather than words, and not on the internet. We're all monkeys in this respect (edit: i.e. I don't mean to pick on you personally), so I don't believe HN can be immune to this (not for a while anyhow). But I do think we can do a little better.

The point here is not about Max Levchin, of course. The point is that feces-throwing is extremely predictable (that's part of its pleasure) and therefore extremely tedious. It cuts against the mandate of this site, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity—the polar opposite of tedium.

Since you agree with this, we agree on the only thing I'm arguing for.

What helps is (a) not doing it, (b) trying not to do it, and/or (c) being conscious that one is doing it— in that order.