Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim get their news from private research departments in their own firms. They may occasionally browse HN for downtime, but I really doubt they have time to read through it in depth. Hell, I'm just a lowly engineer and I rarely have time these days to read through it in depth.

Now, many of the employees of these companies frequently browse HN, and that can sometimes filter upwards if there're relevant or interesting articles there. In general executives rely on people specifically paid to sort through information for them, though. (Though I've heard Larry, Sergey, and many Google executives are big Google Reader users...I guess they'll have to find a new RSS reader now.)

I don't know Larry or Sergey, and I'm not a big fanboi of theirs, but I do know some very wealthy, successful, and powerful people.

I can assure you - very few tech executives have staff members and assistants filter public information for them.

Yes, you want your internal folks to do executive summaries of internal plans/summaries/designs, etc.

And yes, they'll pay $5k/year (or more) to buy analyst reports that summarize things (e.g. bad example Cook Report on the Internet [that'll date me], or Gartner/etc reports).

But Jim Crowe at Level3 read RFCs, and I believe that people like Larry Ellison, Sergey, Zuckerberg, Marc Andresson, Marissa Meyer are reading the real source stuff. They're just doing it in a discrete manner and not posting.

Executives that ONLY rely on the people that report to them are relics of an age of bankers and dinosaurs.

Real tech leaders remain technical and close to the source.