Of course, the spy aspect could be relevant from a professional perspective (depending on what actions he took or what he knew), but I'm guessing you're talking about him having an affair.
In fact, the affair was less important. Even if they were just a very close but unromantic professional relationship it would be a serious scandal.
Most posters in HN don't think "poor corporations are the victims when they are hacked". They think "the corporations should be liable because they did not invest enough in security". This is morally the same.
Nowadays, we make them president.
Yes, in many places, absolutely. Bad decisions in your personal live suggest bad decisions in your professional life.
Now take the same point and apply it to every other crime, misdemeanor, and breaking of rules. Should companies really operate based on that? Or should we maybe draw a boundary around professional life and only consider the professional life?
Does it work the other way as well, so you're forced to divorce your spouse if you make a bad business decision?
It is not so clear, if this is about his character and can he be trusted. This is evidence that someone is capable for lying and doing something that might not be in line with company ethics either. I don't think we can assume from humans that "he lies only in his private life, but can be totally trusted on business side".
HN cares about money and tech. Don’t take morality or life advice from here.
> It’s the well-documented bias in which people systematically overestimate how morally they would behave compared with others—especially in high-pressure or ambiguous situations—while underestimating the situational forces that actually shape behavior.
I'm sure we're all paragons of moral virtue here but the reality is that unless you've been personally targeted by a nation state and successfully resisted, then you're really just fantasizing. Yeah bro, I'm sure you would have effortlessly resisted the Chinese sex trap, right after you benched 1000, got that hole in one and beat Hamilton at qualifying. You're just that good.
I didn't like the book when I first read it (mostly because I seriously dislike Anna, and the book naturally spends a lot of time being told from her POV), but in retrospect, it's brilliant. Tolstoy has, without a single bit of moralizing, presented one of the best arguments I've seen in literature for being faithful to one's spouse and not engaging in affairs.
P.S. I should add that I don't think Tolstoy was inventing the "rich men having affairs was considered normal" aspect for the purpose of the book. I think that was what Russian society was really like at the time, and he took that aspect of society and wrote a book criticizing it, highlighting the negative effects that that attitude would have on people.