Elitists don't think 'the little people' are really people at all. I'm not nearly as great an admirer of Rand as I was in college.
The real difficulty with Eddie Willers is that he simply was far too competent to end up as he did, as Nathaniel Branden pointed out. He did, after all, hold Taggart Transcontinental together while Dagny was off building the John Galt Line, chasing her bedmate of the moment, or wallowing in self-pity in her cabin exile. Toward her other secondary characters I picked up a feeling of contempt - I'm speaking specifically of Rearden's Wet Nurse and Cherryl Taggart here, both of whom ended up enlightened and then dead. Eddie doesn't fall into that category, though. In a lot of ways he's the most interesting character in the novel, and I have to wonder if even Rand knew what to make of him.