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I can agree that corporations are immoral, but no one has ever offered a citation for "legally required to maximize profit". Many corporations have failed in spectacular fashion and yet where are the lawsuits or criminal prosecutions for leaders that fail this supposed obligation?
What does exist is the fiduciary duty to be frank with shareholders, and many corporate officers have been sued for lying by omission. I believe that a corporate officer can choose to prioritize something else besides profit/value, so long as they inform the shareholders. In turn, the shareholders can fire the officer and replace them.
It's no surprise that most officers won't stick out their neck for non-financial causes, but let's be honest if it's simply self preservation rather than some oft-cited but wrong assertion of the law.
I don’t think there’s any legislated law that states that, but some courts treat it as a basic principle (especially in the state of Delaware). What I’ve usually seen as an early example of this is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. from 1919. Henry Ford had amassed a surplus of more than $60 million (equally to more than $1.1 billion today) and wanted to reinvest that money in expanding the business with new factories while continuing to raise wages and cut prices on the Model T. As part of this he wanted to cease special shareholder dividends he had been playing out of the surplus. Brothers John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge owned 10% of Ford and sued to keep the dividend payments coming.
The court ruled that Ford had to pay out a dividend of more than $19 million (more than $360 million today) to the minority shareholders. In the ruling, in a non-binding section, the judge wrote:
Ford was accused of trying to turn the business into a charity. Behind the scenes, though, one of his main motivations for not wanting to pay the dividend was suspicion that the Dodge brothers were using the dividends from his successful business to setup a rival car company to compete against him, which was exactly what they were doing.
It seems the interpretation of the ruling is controversial, even as to whether “maximize shareholder value” is actually enforceable or what the judge meant. I continue to think that the more investors a company has, the less the company will be able to focus on what’s best for the company, customers, and employees in the long run.
It's a consequence of the eBay vs Newmark ruling. Arguments against it are theoretical only and haven't been tested, and would be next to impossible to achieve with extant companies that don't already have advertised social priorities.
For the purposes of my point in this discussion, the distinction doesn't matter. Whether the pressure to maximise profit over morality is a legal requirement or self preservation, the end result is inherent immorality
The case "eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Craig Newmark, et al." in Delaware's Court of Chancery does not support the assertion at all. What the two corporate officers did wrong was to dilute a minority stakeholder's shares for an impermissible reason under Delaware law. One permissible reason to justify such dilution would be if the change was "reasonable to promote shareholder value" (page 49). The two officers could not prove that their actions were reasonable, nor could they prove any other permissible reason, so they lost the case.
At bottom, the major question in that case was whether the corporate officers can conspire with the majority stakeholders to harm a minority stakeholder. It was about two corporate officers that were acting out of self preservation (page 59):
The minor question (whether shareholder value would be promoted) could have been answered in the affirmative and those two would still have lost the case, because Delaware law also doesn't allow harming a stakeholder, violating their fiduciary duty to eBay in this case (page 61):
The court only looked at the minor question to appeal-proof the ruling, because the two corporate officers had tried to match their argument to an earlier DE Supreme Court ruling.
I disagree. Drawing the correct conclusion from the wrong cause is pure sophistry (ie "arbitrary, inauthentic, or deceptive styles of reasoning" -Wikipedia). It is intellectually dishonest to state a conclusion but then decline to support your basis, dismiss your own basis as irrelevant, and then circularly assert that the conclusion stands on its own.
Companies are inherently immoral. Whether the pressure that creates that reality is from this particular case or whether it comes from self preservatio is genuinely irrelevant to my point.
Taking away Musk won't make a company moral, because all publicly traded companies are immoral.
I don't know why this particular case gets people ignoring the topic at hand to argue about it whenever it's mentioned...