This is a terrible take. The people who have sacrificed their ethics/morals/souls to reach the top absolutely optimize for different things than the people who passed an interview and put in their 40-80 hours knowing they'll never be in the c-suite. Suggesting otherwise is naive or intentionally deceptive.

> This is the type of cynicism the post is talking about and it's just trivially untrue.

It's a fundamental truth of capitalism, deeply interwoven in the history of markets and modern capitalism. It began when the Dutch East India Company sailed to the Banda Islands and committed genocide in order to harvest nutmeg for trade. Money is and has always been the prime directive of capitalism.

To quote Tom Stoppard: War is capitalism with the gloves off.