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For that you need passionate people who are wealthy and not primarily driven to acquire more wealth. That seems to be very rare in large scale businesses.
It isn’t wealth that breaks or makes it. The system, and in this case the shareholding system makes it or breaks it. Valve owner Gabe is insanely rich (in the billions I assume) yet, because the system he put up, it is consumer friendly.
The system is the one, not the people.
Yes, the problem is when shareholders only want profit at any cost. These are the wealthy people I was talking about.
I mean, the other thing that’s kind of stupid is - lets say a companies stock once issued goes to 0 and is delisted. So what? That’s not the company going bankrupt. The stock market valuation has no direct application to a company once the shares are issued and bought the first time. But ignoring shareholder demands that would destroy the company wouldn’t likely tank the stock of a otherwise good company - because there’s someone out there who just wants value to hold and preferably dividends vs infinite growth (that doesn’t exist). Now, you could buy enough stock to throw out the CEO and whatever, but that’s likely to be expensive and a PITA. So while there’s going to be some high profile examples, A) that gets close to taking a company private anyway, and doing a shitty job and B) generally limited numbers of companies will have people going to these lengths.
I think the bigger issue isn’t wanting companies to be profitable - that’s kind of the point of companies. The issue is shareholders trying to make capital gains on everything. This isn’t possible long term because infinite growth isn’t possible. I would argue what people and decent investors should want is the steady dividends and not worry about if the stock is up or down.
