More than twelve users have sold stock options for more than $100M? Hello Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim! I would have suspected you were too busy to read HN.
There are probably a lot more household tech names on HN than you'd initially expect.
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 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.
Also, rich people have access to the same internet. Is there an "interesting shit about programming but only for rich people site" that I don't know about?