alt Hacker NewsYeah, I've never found the "maximizing shareholder profit" imperative to be compelling as something that should be done, but as a predictor of how companies will act, it's not something I ever feel safe betting against.
Yeah, I've never found the "maximizing shareholder profit" imperative to be compelling as something that should be done, but as a predictor of how companies will act, it's not something I ever feel safe betting against.
One subtlety that is worth considering is that what a company is inherently set up to do is maximize shareholder value. Value can be quite complex, especially while the number of shareholders is small. Value can include the legacy or reputation of the shareholders. It can include the ethics of the shareholders. It can include completely different goals, like the famous "make humans a multi-planetary species".
Treating value as purely monetary profit is a perversion of that. To a certain degree it's inevitable as the number of shareholders grows, so seeing it in public companies isn't surprising. But even then, if a company focused on creating equipment for sustainable, pesticide free farming were to pivot into making Hellfire missiles that might be insanely profitable while still destroying a large part of what existing shareholders value about the company